Head of Resource Planning

A leading CX provider, unrivalled in developing and training its people to be the best they can be. This investment in people ensures longest staff retention possible enabling them to best serve client's customer service needs.

This leader's main function is to manage a team of Planners and Resource schedulers. Reporting to the Finance Director, this extremely varied role will be to support and develop your team, ensuring that business strategies and processes are aligned utilizing best practices to provide accurate and commercially viable resource models. To identify key initiatives and process changes to continually improve the efficiency and performance of the function. Working with the Senior Operations Team and other Department heads, you will be responsible for forecasting, planning, and scheduling across both customer service and sales teams to ensure the delivery of service excellence across all channels.

You will use short and long-term forecasting models, adherence, and rostering patterns to support and review analysis trends. You will be required to use this information to recommend solutions to optimize effectiveness across all channels. Gathering robust data, you will take a proactive approach to identifying skills gaps and providing solutions.

Working collaboratively with the Operational Teams, you will ensure all Service Level KPIs and other key operational targets are achieved across the business.

This role will be accountable for the direction and development of the planning function, developing your own model for the planning department and recommending to the business the strategy for how this is taken forward to ensure that our approach is forward-thinking and innovative, delivering a first-class service to our clients and customers.

Key stakeholder relationships in this role will be with our Senior Operations Team in order to create an effective operational planning relationship and support Directors and Managers across the business with accurate information that facilitates the correct decisions for our people and clients.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performing planning team that delivers excellent outcomes for the business.
• Build strong planning-to-planning relationships with all clients.
• Develop resource forecasting models, ensuring that all resource planning forecasts, scenarios, and recommendations are based on sound commercial basis, ensuring resources are utilized effectively.
• Analyze future demand and supply forecasts for all clients liaising with relevant departments to ensure that we have enough resources to achieve SLAs.
• Work collaboratively with the Operational Management Teams to plan the daily workflow to ensure all operational SLAs are achieved.
• Manage holidays and shrinkage in line with forecasts.
• Work with the Operational Management Team to authorize offline activity.
• Make appropriate plans for expected changes in profile and workloads. Investigate potential scenarios and find solutions to challenges.
• Offer daily operational support across all channels, driving operational excellence and efficiency improvements.
• Work with the Senior Operational Team to shape, define, and deliver customer service KPIs around productivity and proactively report and review performance.
• Work with the Senior Operational Team to identify operational, financial, and process efficiencies. Produce FTE modeling solutions to drive the most cost-effective and efficient solutions for the business.
• Seek opportunities to improve MI, technologies, workforce management tools, and roster management.
• Continually monitor and propose effective shift patterns to match business requirements, optimizing the performance of all Operational Teams and maximizing agent satisfaction by providing flexible options.
• Monitor and report on forecast accuracy, trends, and utilization.
• Provide information, analysis, and advice on headcount and pipeline.
• Provide daily, weekly, and monthly reports to the Leadership Team as required.
• Ad-hoc duties and projects as required.

Key Requirements

Professional Experience:

• Essential: 3+ years minimum experience in managing a team.
• Proven experience in a Resource & Planning environment.
• Desired: Professional qualification in Resource Planning.

Essential Skills:

• Previous experience of being in a similar role (essential).
• Previous experience of forecasting for a multi-channel customer service function, forecasting demand for voice, email, chat, and back office tasks (essential).
• BPO experience (preferred but not essential).
• Experience of forecasting and scheduling for complex operations.
• Proven experience of designing and implementing contact centre resource models, impact assessments, and scenarios to influence and communicate.
• Advanced use of MS Office suite packages (particularly Microsoft Excel).
• Strong data manipulation experience.
• Self-motivated and performance-driven with the ability to manage and prioritize a heavy workload.
• Excellent communication, ability to work well with a wide range of people.
• Experience with workforce management system IEX Totalview (NICE) experience preferred but not essential.
• Ability to develop resourcing strategies used to deliver client requirements.
• Previous experience of working in a fast-paced, cross-functional group.
• Highly developed stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to challenge and question trends to address issues and identify opportunities for financial growth.
• A high level of accuracy and attention to detail.
• Strong analytical, communication, management, and organizational skills.
• Awareness of commercial models employed within the accounts and the impacts of their teams' decisions on financial performance.

Judgement & Decision Making:

• Ability to make key decisions that impact resource.
• Ability to problem-solve and come up with solutions.
• Ability to identify when and how to escalate.
• Understand when and who should be challenged when there are issues.
• Must be able to intuitively execute resource planning strategies.