Fall Survey Results

Each quarter SWPP surveys the workforce planning community on critical workforce planning topics. Almost 250 call center professionals representing a wide variety of industries participated and provided insight into this quarter’s survey on workforce management team development.

Participant Profile

Forty-two percent of the participants are from call center operations with over 500 agents, followed by 15% with 50 to 100 agents and with 100 to 200 agents.

All types of call center operations are represented in the survey, with the biggest percentages representing financial, insurance, health care, telecommunications, and retail/catalog industries.

Training for New Hires in the WFM Department

se or on-the-job training on the WFM system for new hires in the WFM group, while only 27% provide formal training on company offerings, services, and procedures. Only 15% provide vendor training on the WFM system.

Ongoing Training for WFM Staff

internal training on WFM and other topics, and almost half (47%) have upgrade training for WFM products provided by the vendor. Thirty-six percent provide leadership development training for WFM staff.

Attendance at WFM Software Vendor’s Annual Conference

Thirty-seven percent of the participants say that no one in their organization attends the annual conference of the WFM software vendor, while 25% say some of the team attends each year. Only the management level team members attend in 19% of the participants’ organizations.

Other Development Opportunities for WFM Staff

When asked what other developmental opportunities are offered WFM staff, 35% say that team members can be a member or a leader of a project team, while 27% say team members can belong to local or area call center groups. Twenty-four percent are able to attend the SWPP Annual Conference, and 22% attend industry trade shows.

WFM Internship Program

Over half (55%) say they do not have a WFM apprenticeship/internship program for other company employees to experience WFM. Fourteen percent have it on occasion, and 31% don’t have a formal program but have done such a program.

Percentage of WFM Team Considered Career Workforce Planners

When asked what percentage of the WFM would consider themselves career workforce planners, 25% said 25-50% of the team feel that WFM is a career for them. Twenty-three percent say 50-75% of the team is in WFM as a career, while 22% say less than 25% feel WFM is a career for them.

Most Important Development Opportunity

Survey participants were asked what they thought the most important development opportunity for their workforce management team. Here is a sampling of the responses:

Increasing cross training between different groups within WFM.
Benchmarking with other local contact centers to determine if our WFM team is helping to create a competitive work environment to help drive recruiting and retention when compared with other contact centers.
Attending the annual SWPP conference has been huge. Ideas are brought back to our organization and if we see a benefit to implementing changes, teams are formed to assess what is needed and plan and roll out the changes. This gives team members an opportunity to learn more about the specific function, and allows them to build on their project coordination and leadership skills.
The ability to use statistical analysis and trending to pinpoint call drivers (forecast conditions) for future planning.
In 2011, I am hoping to have my WFM team attend both vendor-related workshops in addition to the SWPP conference. Networking with other WFM professionals and sharing best practices is lacking.
We are getting to a critical stage where we as an organization need to take this seriously and get beyond manually setting schedules and tracking performance.

Please complete the survey on the website at www.swpp.org.