The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Call Center Scheduling

Monet Software, being the experts in this area, have listed for your benefit ways to get your call center scheduling up to snuff, dealing with such thorny issues as how to get your staff to show up for work on time and stick to their planned schedule and break times.

Quantify the implications of missing staff. Hey, start basic -- how much of a problem is it? Put a number to it. Measure adherence and quantify the implications on service level, costs and other metrics that are critical for your business. Look at things like understaffing and decreased service levels.

Set reasonable adherence goals. It’s not necessarily the case that anything short of perfection is failure, you can accomplish an awful lot of positive improvement without solving everything. Identify adherence goals and objectives based on the unique characteristics of your call center environment, include your staff into this process from the beginning, and start with just defining minimum expectations and things like the average handle time of calls, as well as any potential barriers that might prevent adherence.

Identify the reasons for attendance and adherence problems. Either the agent may either be unclear about what the expectations are or unaware of how their behavior is not meeting the expectation, or the agent may require more training, there could be some barrier that prevents adherence or the agent simply lacks the motivation or may be receiving improper consequences.

Identify rewards and consequences that support adherence goals. If an agent has 95 percent adherence, well they get rewarded, and other bonuses should be tied to good scores. Agents must also be seen suffering the consequences for out-of-adherence behavior.

Communicate the “power of one” to all staff. Basically the staff have to know that they’re hurting others by shirking their own responsibility.

Review your tools to manage and track adherence. Here’s where you might want to start looking into workforce management software, since it does a good job helping with ways to automate adherence tracking and reporting capabilities.

Measure and monitor. Yeah yeah, we know you’ve heard this since Day One of B-school, but it really is true: You can only manage what you measure. “Make adherence monitoring and reporting and the regular review with your team part of your staff meetings,” Monet officials recommend. “Over time, the whole team will more and more appreciate the importance of adherence and it will get internalized into your service culture.”

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 Chris DiMarco