Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Improving Schedule Adherence in the Call Center
As the call-center industry begins to explode and expand, creating more offices and hiring significant amounts of new agents, one of the most important tasks is scheduling. Without the right amount of agents on call at that certain time of the day when calls spike, the center won’t be able to provide its customers with the utmost care and attention.
According to Monet Software, a provider of call center solutions, the biggest challenge of a call center is making sure that agents stick to their schedules. Sounds easy enough, right? Yet it is more complex than one would imagine. Adherence is the degree (measured in percent) to which an agent sticks to his or her schedule. Out-of-adherence causes either overstaffing (more agents are scheduled to compensate for lost agent time) or understaffing (no additional agents are staffed to compensate for the lost agent time). Overstaffing results in soaring operational costs, and understaffing impacts revenues and service quality, both impacting the bottom line. Here is an example Monet supplied:
- A call center has 300 employees, each of whom works 5 days a week
- The call center pays each agent $20 an hour
- The loss of time due to out-of-adherence activities equals 10 minutes per day per agent
- The total loss of time will amount to: 10 minutes X 5 days X 52 weeks = 2,600 minutes or 43.3hours each year per agent
- The next question of course is how to fix this problem, which is why Monet is offering a five step approach to help call centers beat the challenges of increasing costs, lower revenues, expansion, and customer frustration.
Determine your current adherence level
There is a simple formula that you can use to find out the percentage of schedule adherence: [phone time + other work-related activity time] / ([shift time] - [lunch/dinner] -[break] + [exception time] + [overtime]) = schedule adherence; although you may have to modify it to adjust to your center. After the level of adherence is found the amount of lost time and excess costs can be calculated.
Identify reasons for out-of-adherence
By figuring out which agents have bad reports and what times of days adherence is at its lowest, managers will be able to adjust the schedules accordingly. Some of the most common reasons employees are sticking to their schedules is:
- Agents showing up late for their shifts
- Taking an extended break
- Logging out 10-15 minutes before their shift ends
- Frequently remaining absent
- An extremely rigid schedule
Educate about the business impact of adherence
It is important for managers to have regular meetings daily so that agents can get a better idea of how vital this scheduling is to a call center’s performance levels. This can be done by visually presenting reports of costs, ASA, and other metrics to educate them, or how adherence-behavior impacts the overall team performance.
Regular adherence monitoring and reviews
Adherence monitoring and reporting should be a key part of staff meetings and managers must discuss goals and schedule so there is no miscommunication on either side; every point should be well defined and clear.
Set realistic goals and offer rewards
Lastly, it is important to set goals that are feasible to the agent, and once they reach the goals the organization should provide some type of way to motivate them, like bonuses or activities such as team breakfasts or lunches.
These are just some methods on how call centers can improve their productivity levels. For more information on schedule adherence, please visit Monet’s whitepaper, ‘How to Improve Agent Schedule Adherence in your Call Center.’
Edited by Rory J. Thompson