Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Boosting Adherence is Necessary When the Call Center Schedule and Reality are Far Apart
In the call center, scheduling and adherence to schedules are incredibly critical. Many contact centers pride themselves on the schedules they build. They start from scratch and create an ideal schedule that has everything the call center requires: adequate coverage, the right skills, and insurance that all customer media will be handled promptly.
And then, inevitably, reality intrudes.
Someone calls in sick. Someone takes an extra long lunch because her boyfriend broke up with her. Someone got stuck in traffic. Agent number 16 went home with food poisoning. Your best agent took a call from an elderly platinum customer who needed everything repeated four times. Suddenly, your beautiful schedule is simply a piece of paper or a digital file that bears no resemblance to reality, and your adherence rates drop to dismal numbers.
Schedule adherence is an important metric in the contact center. Adherence, which is expressed as a percentage, is determined by calculating the percentage of time a call center agent is at his or her workstation and available to take calls divided by the time they are scheduled to work. In other words, what percentage of the time the agent is actually working compared to what he or she was supposed to work. It often factors in time spent on breaks, after-call wrap-up work, training time or administrative events. Smart call centers build in a little extra time for schedules for unexpected time away from the workstation.
Being out of adherence can result in some unpleasant consequences for the call center: for starters, a call center might have to over-staff to compensate for the lost agent time for employees with low adherence. This gets expensive in terms of costs. Understaffed contact centers resulting from a lack of adherence can cause long queues for customers and damage customer relationships. This gets expensive in terms of lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction.
If your adherence levels are too low, there are two factors that could be at work: either you are building the schedules incorrectly, or your agents are lagging in performance. The answer to both problems is a cutting-edge workforce management solution.
Many of today's solutions, such as Monet Software's WFM Live, allows contact centers to continuously monitor and record the real-time status of agents to ensure that they are available for calls, and take their lunch and breaks at just the right time to match the schedule. Call center managers can use the solution to compare planned agent activity to actual activities, and see the exact status of each agent in real time against the planned activity. Monet's WFM Live also allows for the creation of custom states and rules to match the unique needs of the call center.
Essentially, call center managers need not wait until the end of the day, the week or the month to determine they were out of adherence. They can know in real-time when reality is departing from the schedule, and they understand precisely where the bottle neck (or...more specifically...with whom) is occurring, allowing them to take steps to mitigate the problem and regain adherence.
It's a layer of accountability and insurance that manual schedule and tracking building simply can't supply. It's also a relatively easy way to gain new efficiencies in the contact center that will have a direct, positive impact on both the customer relationship and the bottom line.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi