Contact Centre Workforce Manager of the Year

Contact Centre Workforce Manager of the Year - Mark Williams

Our thanks to Mark Williams and his workforce team at TelstraClear for providing the photos and the interview.





 

1. Congratulations on your win. We all know workforce management is wide and varied and the roles are unique to each centre. Can you briefly describe your responsibilities and main focus as the workforce manager at TelstraClear?

Yes, the role is wide and varied and no two days are alike. The main areas are forecasting call volume and average handle time and then using this information to create a roster. The forecasting side involves looking at the history and then seeing what’s coming up like marketing campaigns, product launches, system changes, etc and then quantifying the impact of these. Sounds simple but as any workforce manager knows, it’s not easy and a lot of assumptions need to be made.

I’m also looking at attrition levels and liaising with the site managers around timings of inductions, training, etc as well as reporting and some real time queue management.

2. As part of your award winning entry, you would have outlined some of your targets - are you able to share some of them with the TUANZ contact centre community?  If so, what are the and how do you meet them?

The main target is forecasting accuracy. If I don’t get the forecast right then the roster isn’t going to be right. We also have a big focus on reporting back to the site managers, not just the headline metrics like service level and abandonment but also the more specific ones like sickness levels and training requirements.

3. Do you think entering the awards (evaluating the metric you use, articulating the successes your centre has had) was useful? If so, can you provide us with tangible examples of what you learned during the process?

Yes it was very useful. I was a finalist the previous year so knew that there was a lot of work involved. It gives you a great opportunity to take stock of what you’ve being doing, looking at what you’ve achieved and also looking at what didn’t work out but you learnt something from it. In the fast paced environment we work in, that’s something we should perhaps do more often.

4. What difference has the win made to you and your team?

Personally, it’s given me confidence that I’m a doing a good job. Quite a bit of my work is based around theory and hypothetical situations which makes proving that your calculations are correct quite difficult. It gave the team great kudos too. We work as a pretty tight knit unit and I mentioned on the night that although it’s an individual award that I was really accepting on behalf of them.

5. After your success this year, it would be easy and very human, to sit back and bask in the glory. How do you motivate yourself and/or your team to achieve even more for the future? And what is your main focus in the coming 12 months?

It would be easy to sit back and relax but to me, now is the time to really justify winning the award. The expectations of me are higher now which keeps me motivated and striving to achieve more. 

The next year, like every one, will be ever changing and the focus will be to meet the challenges that await. Working in a rostered environment is not easy in the modern world and I’ll be continuing to focus on trying to achieve a good work/life balance for our staff whilst ensuring the needs of the company and not compromised.