Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Understanding Agent Adherence Requires Some Psychoanalysis
So you’ve carefully built a great schedule for the contact center. You’ve examined historical data, accounted for all manner of future conditions, run simulations, shared schedules with agents, and double-checked everything. Sometime later, the schedule utterly falls apart because of a lack of adherence. Where did you go wrong?
As a manager, it’s possible that you didn’t go wrong. Agents may simply not be adhering to their schedules. And while it’s tempting to yell, admonish and even threaten, that’s unlikely to solve the problem. Instead you need to understand why agents aren’t adhering. It’s time to step away from erlang and workload distributions and enter the world of psychology and behavior analytics, according to Penny Reynolds writing for the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP).
“There are three basic reasons why an employee doesn’t do what is expected,” she wrote. “These reasons are Don’t Know; Can’t; Won’t.”
While “Won’t” may not be a problem you can solve as a manager (except, perhaps for parting ways with the employee if you’ve tried reasonable steps and they’ve failed to work), “Don’t Know” and “Can’t” are adherence problems you can solve.
“Don’t know” can be solved by clearly communicating what’s expected of agents. Ensure that agents understand when and how long their breaks are and communicate how their lack of adherence could be throwing the entire workforce into chaos. Ensure there are clocks in break areas, and that agents can easily access their schedules.
“Can’t” is a little harder to solve. Agent may not have enough time to accomplish their after-call wrap-up, or their desktop processes may be onerous and repetitive. (How many desktop applications are agents expected to use? Can they be consolidated?)
One way to ensure agents are doing all they can to hit their adherence targets is to make consequences immediate – a bad review at some uncertain time in the future probably won’t solve it – and constructive. A warning note from a manager to an employee late coming back from a break can attach immediate consequences to negative behavior. Consequences can also be positive.
“The key when developing a plan of consequences is to apply consequences that are positive to shape desired behavior,” wrote Reynolds. “However, it’s not enough that the consequence is positive. It also has to be personal (something that means something to the employee), immediate, and certain for it to work as an influence on behavior.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle