Leveraging the Right Call Center Management Solutions to Reduce Shrinkage

As one working in the role of call center management, how do you ensure that the schedules you set for your employees not only meet with your budgetary requirements, but that they also encourage adherence among your staff? Whenever your agents are not productive, they are causing shrinkage and shrinkage adds cost to every call. How can you be sure to maximize performance, optimize schedules and keep shrinkage to a minimum?

This recent Monet Software blog explored the concept of shrinkage as it pertains to call center management. To first define shrinkage, it is the time, or the percentage of time, that your agents are not productive while on your dime. This lack of productivity may be due to meetings, breaks, illness, vacation, training, absenteeism, etc. While many of these activities can be built into the schedule, adherence can cause a ripple in your entire call center management process.

In all reality, adherence really cannot be planned for, regardless of the effectiveness of your call center management. Adherence is a measurement of the time your agents are scheduled to work compared with the time they actually work. If an agent leaves early, starts later or takes longer breaks than allowed for in the schedule, shrinkage is caused. This shrinkage has an immediate impact on service levels, as well as other call center metrics due to the under-staffing of the call center.

With negative benefits readily obvious, it’s critical that call center management put the right solution and processes in place to enforce schedule adherence and reduce shrinkage. And, while many a call center management personnel may want to completely eliminate any unplanned shrinkage, this is not a realistic approach to solving the problem. Instead, the focus should be on reducing shrinkage to an acceptable level.

One of the major causes of unplanned shrinkage is out-of-adherence. Call centers often lack the necessary visibility into what happens at any given moment in time, as well as what is supposed to happen based on the schedule published by call center management. Therefore, it’s critical that the call center implement the right platform for establishing the schedule and leveraging true visibility across the call center to drive lower shrinkage and higher productivity.

If you’d like additional guidance for your call center management to get a true handle on adherence issues within your environment, download Monet Software’s latest white paper: “Strategies for improving call center schedule adherence". In this publication, you’ll learn about proven practices in schedule adherence that lead to increased availability and reduced shrinkage for an improved call center environment.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco