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The Professional Planning Forum

An independent industry body established in 2000, we promote best practice and effective planning in customer contact operations - working in all sectors to provide strategic advice and best practice support for managers and to offer specialist training and accreditation for planning and analysis.

Facilitating nine communities of best practice, which can be accessed from the buttons to the left of this webpage, our aims are to:-

Establish professionalism in planning and analysis across all customer contact operations.
Promote best practice benchmarking as a planning methodology that every manager needs to embrace.
Offer year-round advice and support for our members.
Provide specialist training, qualifications, standards and accreditation.
Work with industry leaders to champion the needs of our members and encourage innovation.

We have uploaded a wealth of new best practice material from our Customer Contact Planning conference and awards and research programmes. Please use these to drive improvements in your operation, join as a member to access our full library and our free member events and take advantage of our wide range of services.

If you have any questions you can email info@planningforum.co.uk or call 0333 1235960. Or contact any of the team, you can find contact details here.

Best practice
Professionalism
Qualifications
Accreditation
Standards

Promoting best practice throughout the industry is a key goal for us and membership of the Professional Planning Forum is no longer just for planners. Best practice is a planning discipline that all managers need to master and our case studies, events and advice is mostly free to members - set up to help you identify what you need to do to improve – or further develop.

Membership of the Planning Forum offers
-    Specialist networking
-    Case studies & articles
-    Discounts on training
-    Conference & seminars
-    Site visits & round-tables
-    Research & accreditation
Find out more

Professionalism in planning and analysis is a key goal of the Planning Forum. Research in 2010 demonstrated that confident, skilled planners are one of the two top factors behind improved performance in the customer contact operation. Confidence is essential in gaining buy-in, the other top factor. Skills are vital because the challenges have grown and far more is now expected of the planning department.

This means doing things differently. In scheduling, for example it is (relatively) easy to create schedules that are efficient or which make people happy, but you are playing in a different league if you want to do both at the same time. In MI & Analytics, we’ve moved beyond collecting data into challenging the metrics we use, working with all stakeholders and searching new sources for information.

Foundation, Specialist and Advanced Certificates in contact centre planning and analysis offer you industry-standard qualification. Project-based and supported by telephone tutoring during the year, these programmes use our specialist training courses to offer a structured development path that delivers proven results. We are also discussing new post-graduate qualifications in partnership with universities. Find out more.

Our research shows that 56% of planners had no formal training in the last year. Under these circumstances, how sound can our decisions really be? Yet results demonstrate that developing planning skills drives improvement. A typical Foundation Certificate graduate saved £80,000pa in FTE within 6 weeks of returning from the first part of the £2.5k programme. Advanced students gain monthly mentoring to support them in undertaking even larger projects.

Professional Accreditation is your opportunity to have formal industry recognition for your professional skills and experience as a contact centre planner or analyst. Attaining each level will be based on evidence of qualifications, experience, learning and commitment to best practice - to support the development of your professional career. Find out more.

With four accreditation levels, there is a category to recognise each stage of the professional career path – from Foundation Member to Fellow. You gain access to our new professional development portal and are expected to commit at least 8-9hours per month to your continual professional development. As well as formal training, this will include networking, supporting other professionals or writing/presenting at events on in online forums.

Business Accreditation offers the chance to externally validate and improve your planning capability and functions. A new product from the Professional Planning Forum, a few respected organisations are being offered the chance to be part of our initial pilot programme – contact Dave Vernon if you would like to know more. Take your organisation to the next level in driving best practice.

You benchmark your planning and analysis capability as part of a peer group of non-competing organisations – applying the Planning Forum’s standards framework to establish the level at which you are operating in each area and to pinpoint areas which you can prioritise for improvement. Highly focussed, this small-group benchmarking takes our best practice support to a new level and gives you objective independent validation.

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