Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Understanding Schedule Adherence in the Contact Center
In the contact center, scheduling is often one of the trickiest tasks a manager can perform. Scheduling, which relies on dozens or even hundreds of people to work together like a fine-tuned machine, has more moving parts than any other contact center process. For this reason, it’s the most challenging of call center managers’ duties. To maintain a baseline of good customer service, it’s also one of the most critical processes to get right.
Building the schedule itself isn’t necessarily complex…not anymore. What was once created by hand with painstaking work and complex formulas can now be accomplished with cloud-based software that helps take into account many factors, such as time of year and historical performance. So while building schedules is easier, schedule adherence is still a problem in most contact centers. This means agents are having trouble sticking to the schedules managers have built for them.
How Do You Improve Adherence?
For starters, it’s important to note when agents are most likely to be out of adherence. If your contact center is like most, it will happen when shifts are changing. Call center schedules tend to be complex – a mix of media, and full-time and part-time workers -- so there are often weak spots in transitions. Pay extra attention to shift changes and observe the kind of behaviors that lead to a lack of adherence. It may be workers chatting, or showing up at their desks five minutes late. It may be complex log-in and log-out processes on desktop solutions. It may be onerous after-call wrap-up processes. Before you can cure it, you need to figure out why it’s happening.
Next, it’s important that contact center workers understand how their behavior is leading to a lack of adherence, and why adherence is important. Communication can go a long way toward solving the problem. Talk openly with both veteran agents and new hires (and even recruits and applicants) about your contact center’s policy regarding scheduling. Ensure they understand what your company expects of them. This increased understanding between agents and managers will lead to a better work environment for everyone, including better adherence across the board and not just at shift changes.
Look for a contact center workforce management and scheduling solution such as Monet Software that includes tools for real-time schedule adherence. These tools compare planned agent activity to actual activities throughout the day, and alert managers in real-time when schedules are out of adherence, allowing call center managers to take corrective action to bring operations back within acceptable parameters.
Edited by Maurice Nagle