Managing Call Center Adherence

Call centers are a symphony of collaboration and organization requiring the careful management of a number of unique faculties to be fully realized. But the most complex system you’ll need to manage is not one that you’ll house in your server room or purchase from a provider, it’s the human element. Ensuring that your agents are not only happy, but meeting their requirements is just as essential as maintaining your ACD or metrics programs, and because people don’t come with instructions or a tech hotline, it’s also much more challenging.

Adherence is the frequency with which your agents are sticking to their predetermined shift and break allotments. While keeping a general eye on this number may be good enough for some call centers, without proper management, lack of adherence can leach a considerable sum from your operation.

For instance, a 25 agent center can save over $30,000 per year just by improving staff adherence by two percent and reducing shrinkage by 15 minutes per agent per day.

Going even further, let’s say a call center has 300 employees, each one working five days a week at $20 an hour. If the loss of time due to out-of-adherence activities equals 10 minutes per day per agent that’s 2,600 minutes or 43.3 hours each year per agent. That’s more than one week of work lost to one agent annually for failing to meet adherence standards.

Your best option for managing this essential metric in your call center is first and foremost indentifying your adherence levels, then identifying the reasons for any issues with adherence, followed by educating your staff on the impacts of adherence, and finally regular monitoring and reviews on adherence.

The first step to this is to implement a workforce management platform that allows you to track the hours worked by each agent. This overview coupled with information on when your strongest periods of call volume are will leave you better prepared to schedule your workers. By proactively working to get the scheduling process as close to your agent’s needs as possible you’ll be better prepared to deal with lapses in adherence.

Considering how much money lack of adherence can cost your organization, investment in combating this common issue is certainly worth a look.

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Chris DiMarco is a Managing Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Follow him on Twitter (News - Alert) @cpdimarco.

Edited by Stefanie Mosca