Service Operations Management for Contact Centre Managers Training Course

Course overview

Contact centre managers are expected to protect service levels, control operating costs and improve customer experience while managing volatile demand, staffing constraints, repeat contacts and changing priorities. Many teams rely on headline metrics such as average handling time or service level without understanding the trade-offs behind them. This course equips managers to run the contact centre as an operational system: forecasting demand, translating workload into staffing requirements, managing intraday performance and identifying the process failures that create avoidable customer effort and cost.

Participants learn to build an operational scorecard, interpret queue and workforce metrics, apply Erlang-based capacity planning principles, and distinguish useful performance measures from measures that drive poor behaviour. The course covers demand forecasting, interval staffing, schedule adherence, shrinkage, service-level management, quality assurance, root-cause analysis and continuous improvement. Managers practise making operational decisions using volume, handle-time, occupancy, abandonment and customer-contact data rather than intuition alone.

Delivery combines instructor-led explanations with realistic contact centre data sets, team-based scenario work and practical calculation exercises. Participants use Excel and Power BI examples to turn raw operational data into staffing views, performance dashboards and improvement priorities. By the end of the week, each participant produces a contact centre operations improvement plan containing a metric baseline, capacity assumptions, service risks, escalation actions and a 90-day implementation roadmap that can be used with their own team.

The course is designed for new and established contact centre managers, team leaders moving into operational management, and service leaders responsible for voice, email, chat or blended-channel environments.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Build a contact centre operational scorecard using service level, abandonment, occupancy, adherence, quality and customer-effort measures
• Forecast contact demand by interval using historical volumes, seasonal patterns and known business drivers
• Calculate staffing requirements using workload, shrinkage, average handling time and Erlang-based capacity principles
• Diagnose queue-performance problems through analysis of wait time, abandon rate, answer rate and interval coverage
• Create an intraday management plan with triggers, escalation actions, reallocation decisions and stakeholder communications
• Apply root-cause analysis to repeat contacts, transfer patterns, avoidable demand and quality failures
• Design a balanced performance-management approach that prevents harmful overemphasis on average handling time
• Produce a 90-day contact centre operations improvement plan with baselines, targets, owners and review cadence

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Contact Centre Managers — who own service performance, staffing decisions and day-to-day operating results
• Customer Service Managers — who need to connect customer experience measures with capacity and process performance
• Contact Centre Team Leaders — who are preparing to manage schedules, queues and wider operational priorities
• Workforce Management Analysts — who need stronger operational context for forecasts, schedules and intraday recommendations
• Operations Managers — who oversee multi-channel service teams and must improve productivity without damaging customer outcomes
• Quality Assurance Managers — who need to link quality findings to repeat demand, coaching priorities and operational improvement

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should understand the basic purpose of a contact centre and be familiar with common measures such as average handling time, service level, abandonment rate and customer satisfaction. Experience supervising, reporting on or supporting a customer service operation is helpful, but prior workforce management responsibility is not required. Participants should be comfortable working with tables and simple formulas in Microsoft Excel, including sorting, filtering and percentages. No prior knowledge of Erlang calculations, Power BI, formal operations management methods or a specific contact centre platform is required. Complete beginners should expect practical introductions before applying each method.

Training methodology

The course uses facilitated lessons, worked calculations and contact-centre operating scenarios rather than abstract operations theory. Participants examine interval demand data, staffing reports, queue dashboards, quality results and repeat-contact patterns in small groups. They build Excel-based planning views, interpret Power BI dashboards and practise decisions for surges, absenteeism and service-risk events. Case discussions test the consequences of competing priorities such as cost control, speed, quality and customer effort. Each day adds to an individual operations improvement plan, which participants refine through instructor feedback on the final day.

Course outline

Day 1: The contact centre operating system

• Contact centre value streams and customer demand types
• Leading and lagging operational performance measures
• Service level, answer rate and abandonment definitions
• Average handling time components and variability
• Occupancy, utilisation and the productivity trade-off
• Balanced scorecard design for voice and digital channels
• Daily, weekly and monthly operating review cadences

Workshop: Participants audit a sample contact centre scorecard and produce a revised KPI set with metric definitions, targets and decision uses.

Day 2: Forecasting demand and planning capacity

• Interval volume profiles and peak-demand patterns
• Historical data cleansing and outlier treatment
• Seasonality, events and business-driver forecasting
• Average handling time forecasting by contact type
• Workload calculations in offered hours
• Erlang C principles for service-level capacity planning
• Shrinkage assumptions for absence, training and meetings

Workshop: Participants create an interval demand forecast and staffing requirement model for a simulated service week using Excel.

Day 3: Scheduling and intraday performance control

• Matching staffing supply to interval demand
• Schedule efficiency and coverage-gap analysis
• Schedule adherence and conformance measures
• Real-time queue monitoring and threshold design
• Intraday management actions for demand spikes
• Escalation playbooks for service-level risk
• Cross-channel routing and blended-agent deployment

Workshop: Participants run an intraday control-room simulation and produce an escalation log, action plan and stakeholder update.

Day 4: Quality, demand reduction and process improvement

• Quality assurance calibration and defect categorisation
• Repeat-contact measurement and first-contact resolution
• Transfer, escalation and complaint-pattern analysis
• Pareto analysis of avoidable demand drivers
• Five Whys and fishbone root-cause methods
• Process mapping for customer contact journeys
• Improvement prioritisation using impact-effort matrices

Workshop: Participants analyse a repeat-contact case and produce a root-cause map with prioritised corrective actions.

Day 5: Operational governance and improvement planning

• Performance review packs and management narratives
• Dashboard design in Power BI for operational decisions
• Target setting and metric guardrails
• Coaching actions linked to operational evidence
• Risk registers for service continuity and capacity
• Ninety-day improvement roadmap design
• Benefits tracking and operational governance routines

Workshop: Participants present a 90-day contact centre operations improvement plan containing baselines, targets, owners, risks and review milestones.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Genesys Cloud CX, COPC CX Standard

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions