Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
August 11, 2011
What Out-of-Adherence Costs Your Call Center
In the process of developing your approach to call center scheduling, do you take schedule adherence into account? Believe it or not, if your call center is just a few minutes out of adherence from your schedule, it can cost your center considerable dollars you may not have to spend. Fortunately, educating your call center managers and staff about the importance of schedule adherence can improve overall performance and control costs.
A recent Monet Software webinar focuses on the importance of schedule adherence in call center scheduling. There are three areas that are immediately affected when your call center is out-of-adherence. One, your speed to answer the customer on the line is reduced. Two, your staff workload and occupancy are affected. And, three, your telephone costs can soar. All three impacts are completely avoidable when you understand the impact of out-of-adherence within the call center.
To truly understand the costs associated with call center scheduling and out-of-adherence, you need to measure and quantify the effect this has on your customers in terms of speed of service; your agents and if higher occupancy is needed; and your bottom line as the longer customers spend in the queue, the more money it is costing the organization. Just mentioning these things, however, is not as powerful as actually doing the calculations.
Let’s consider this example of the value of out-of-adherence in call center scheduling. Let’s say that you have 200 call center associates and due to out-of-adherence activities, they lose 10 minutes per day. At an average of $15 per hour wage for your 200 call center agents, the resulting cost is staggering.
The equation:
10 minutes X 5 days X 52 weeks = 2,600 minutes per year = 43.3 hours per year.
43 hours X $15 = $650 per person X 200 agents = $130,000.
When you take the time to do the math and understand the actual hard dollar costs associated with out-of-adherence activities related to your call center scheduling, you can take a step back and evaluate the necessary internal changes needed to reduce the wasted time. Yes, you will still have some out-of-adherence, but the goal is to minimize this as much as possible.
Check out the Monet Software webinar for some important strategies you can employ within your center to minimize your loss and make proper call center scheduling and adherence a priority.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Chris DiMarco