Ben Heslop has spent over twenty years in resource planning, working across some of the UK’s largest and most complex contact centre environments. His career spans telecoms, retail, utilities, and outsourced contact centre operations – taking him from his first planning role, where he was handed a folder of unexplained screenshots and told to get on with it, to Director of Resource and Data.
Throughout that journey, Ben has built and led planning functions from scratch, turned around operations where service levels were in freefall, and delivered consultancy work that clients described as transformational. The results speak for themselves: an abandon rate dropped from 35% to 3% in three weeks. Attrition cut almost in half with a single scheduling change. A workforce management implementation recognised as a finalist at the National Planning Forum awards for best partnership.
More than half the advisors Ben has planned for have been on personalised work-life balance packages – not as a feel-good initiative, but as a deliberate planning strategy with measurable results. Lower absence, lower attrition, higher engagement. It reflects a belief that runs through everything in this book: the best planning outcomes happen when you treat the people behind the numbers as the point of the exercise, not a variable to be managed around.
Ben has provided consultancy to major businesses across retail and broadband, worked with workforce management vendors to shape product development, and made it his mission throughout his career to raise the standard of planning practice wherever he has worked.
Smooth Planning is his first book. It is the guide he wished he had been handed on day one.