Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Make Schedule Adherence Win-Win in the Contact Center
Not all contact center agents are created equal. When I was a contact center agent, I made sure I was promptly at my desk on or before my scheduled start time and with my terminal already booted and ready to go. But not all agents were as conscientious as myself.
While starting to log into a terminal at start time isn’t egregious, or taking a couple more minutes during lunch break, it does add up.
“Call center schedules tend to be very complex – which means there can be a lot of junctures during a shift where an agent will go out of adherence,” noted a recent blog post by contact center software solutions provider, Monet Software. “For example, an agent might show up for his shift five minutes late; log on to the ACD seven minutes late; show up for a training session eight minutes late; and go over their break time by 10 minutes - resulting in the agent being a total of 30 minutes out of adherence for that one shift.”
Multiply this 30 minutes times dozens or even hundreds of agents, and that amounts to a substantial loss of time. Schedule adherence is a lot more important than most contact center managers realize.
Minimizing this wasted time requires good time tracking, however, and that can be a big time waster itself. Manually tracking schedule adherence hardly makes sense.
But tracking time automatically does pay off, which is why schedule adherence is best achieved through the use of a web-based contact center solution. A web-based tracker makes it possible to always know where the slippage is occurring, which makes it easier to nip the problem in the bud.
Employees won’t like the idea of being watched at first, however. There’s an element of Big Brother to the idea that login times are meticulously watched. Monet Software suggests being straight with employees as a way to combat this issue, and by educating them on the situation.
“Agents need to understand the relevance of schedule adherence, how a mere 10 minutes here and there impacts other agents and the entire call center performance,” noted the Monet blog.
Monet also suggests giving out incentives for good attendance. This way the monitoring is not viewed so much as a negative event as it is an opportunity to win something. This turns schedule adherence tracking into a positive.
Schedule adherence saves in lost productivity. So if employees can see strict adherence as a personal benefit, that’s definitely win-win both for company and employee.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi