Real Time Adherence Monitoring Boosts Service and Saves Money

Adherence is the single biggest challenge in call center scheduling. Since staffing makes up the bulk of a call center budget holding your employees accountable for their adherence can go a logway in saving money and increasing productivity. But before call center managers can hold their workforce accountable for adherence they need to be monitoring it.

In an article last year for TMC (News - Alert), Tracey Schelmetic says “a critical factor is adherence reporting. Discovering that the adherence rates for the entire contact center are missing the mark lets you know that you have work ahead of you, but it doesn’t point you in the right direction to correct the problems. Real-time adherence monitoring, accompanied by customized reporting, will tell you WHY you are out of adherence. It might be certain agents or certain work groups, or it may not be agents’ fault at all: a poorly designed schedule might be the cause of low service levels. It may be a certain time of day that causes the most trouble spots, which narrows down your list of probable causes.”

In a study conducted in 2009, half of the contact centers involved revealed they were not monitoring schedule adherence. It is likely the other half had better customer service ratings and spent significantly less filling gaps in agent availability.

When you have adherence numbers on hand you can hold your employees accountable. Operators need to be aware that taking a quick break for 10 minutes may not seem like a lot, but when compounded between all agents, 10 minutes here and there can throw a wrench in service levels. Real-time adherence monitoring as well as a program that allows employees to understand their responsibilities will positively affect service level goals.

The return on investment for a Real time adherence monitoring platform is huge. Giving managers the ability to drill down on stats and hold individuals accountable for breaks means a savings of both time and money.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC 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.

Edited by Chris DiMarco