Estimating the Costs of Out-of-Adherence in Call Center Scheduling

Scheduling is critical to ensure the smooth operation of the call center – but is it really as easy as set the schedule and agents follow it? How do you ensure it meets your needs and the availability of your agents? How do you design a schedule that keeps customers happy? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you be sure your call center scheduling keeps costs at a minimum?

This Monet Software blog honed in on the importance of call center scheduling as it relates to satisfying your needs, creating a excellent experience for the customer base and keeping all costs at a minimum. More critically, it focused on the importance of keeping agents adhering to your schedule, ensuring costly out-of-adherence doesn’t occur.

When call center scheduling fails to prevent out-of-adherence, there are three areas that will immediately demonstrate the impact. First, the speed to answer customers is reduced, which affects your service levels and customer satisfaction. Second, staff workload and occupancy are nearly immediately affected, which hurts productivity and drives up costs related to staffing. Finally, telephone costs can also soar, leading to higher operational costs. 

The good news is that all three areas are actually avoidable when you simply focus on call center scheduling and understand the impact that out-of-adherence can have within the center. To determine the costs associated with call center scheduling and out-of-adherence, measure and quantify the effect.

If you consider the 200-seat call center with a loss of 10 minutes per day due to out-of-adherence activities, what will this cost the organization? If the average salary within that call center is $15 per hour for all 200 agents, the resulting cost to the organization is $130,000 per year – a significant chunk for only 10 minutes.

• 10 minutes x 5 days x 52 weeks = 2,600 minutes per year = 43.3 hours per year.

• 43.3 hours x $15 = $650 per person x 200 agents = $130,000.

This same math can be applied to your own call center scheduling activities to get a grasp on the actual hard dollar costs associated with an out-of-adherence call center. Evaluate the necessary internal changes necessary to reduce the amount of time wasted in your call center so you can optimize profitability.

After all, your customers will keep calling – are you focused on taking the call at the lowest cost possible while maintaining high quality service levels? If not, you may require more help than focused call center scheduling.

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