Webinar Addresses Issues of Schedule Adherence in Call Centers

A recent webinar title “Six Simple Strategies for Improving Schedule Adherence in your Call Center” was offered by Monet Software, dealing with the thorny issue of ensuring there is the right number of staff with the right skills in their seats at the right times of the day.  

“One of the toughest jobs related to managing any call center may not be the intricate calculations of proper forecasting nor the numerous iterations of coming up with the best schedule mix,” webinar officials noted, adding that “some call centers are much more successful than others at this schedule adherence dilemma.”

In other words, how do you get staff to show up for work on time and stick to their planned break times, as well as generally acceptable time on various work tasks?

Presenter Penny Reynolds from the The Call Center School, a well-known expert on such issues, discussed such issues as the quantify the cost and service implications of missing staff, identifying ways to communicate and educate staff on the “power of one” in call center staffing, identifying the reasons why staff don't adhere to the schedule plan and finding reward and consequence programs that support adherence goals.

As Reynolds pointed out during the presentation, you’re most likely losing a lot more easily recoverable time than you realize. If you’re losing ten minutes a day from an agent’s time at work, at five days a week and 52 weeks a year, that’s over 40 hours lost, she pointed out: “That’s a whole work week, close to 43 hours.”

Also presenting was Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of Monet Software, a pioneer in modern workforce optimization for the rapidly changing call center industry. He looked at the same metric Reynolds did from a different angle -- say you’re missing ten minutes a day from an agent, showing that ten minutes out of adherence a day for 200 agents means about $130,000 lost a year.

Click here to register now for this free presentation.

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Jennifer Russell