Adherence in Your Call Center Management Strategy

Your customers are the lifeblood of your organization, and you want to ensure that they keep coming back by providing them with the highest service levels possible. To do this you need to be monitoring and effectively managing the primary link you have with customers; your agents.

 Ensuring your agents are meeting predetermined service goals is essential to satisfying customers. Adherence, or how closely your agents are following their schedules not only ensures you’re getting the most out of your staffing budget, but is also a good indicator of an agents commitment to his or her daily tasks.

A strategic approach to improving agent adherence is crucial for call centers struggling with the challenges of rising costs, lower revenues, and frustrated customers. Here’s one strategy to help boost agent adherence that you can employ right now.

The first step to improving your adherence levels is to determine where they are, and how much you’re actually losing when agents fail to meet their obligations.  Monet suggests using the following formula to find the percentage of adherence you have [phone time + other work related activity time] / ([shift time] - [lunch/dinner] - [break] + [exception time] + [overtime]) = schedule adherence. Once you know how close your agents are coming to perfect adherence levels you’ll be able to tailor strategies to improve them.

Once you have information on where your agent’s adherence stats are you’ll need to set some goals and offer rewards for cooperation in better adherence. Since it’s nearly possible that every one of your agents will be on the phone exactly when scheduled, take exactly a 30 minute lunch and 15 minute break and always leave on time, perfect adherence is unrealistic. Instead focus on offering incentives for agents that get as close to perfect as possible. Rewards can be things like additional break time, vacation days, or first dibs on more attractive time slots.

When you’re trying to address adherence issues you need to keep the human element in mind, and not just your customers, your agents as well. Work with them in obtaining the levels you want and you’ll foster a sense of pride and a commitment to the business in the process.

Edited by Stefanie Mosca