Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Keeping Service Levels High With Real-time Adherence Monitoring
If you were to poll a number of contact center managers about their biggest challenges, chances are good that agent adherence will show up near the top of their lists. It’s impossible to overstate how critical adherence is a contact center. A contact center may have the best scheduling solution in the world, but it’s not going to do a lot of good if agents are always out of adherence and, as a result, service levels begin to slide. Even worse, it certainly doesn’t benefit the contact center if managers are not sure what their adherence is, or if they see service level statistics days or weeks after the fact.
In a study conducted last year, fully half of contact centers revealed that they did not monitor schedule adherence. It’s safe to say, however, that the companies with the best reputations for customer service know their adherence statistics at all times. To follow the best practices of the highest ranked customer service organizations, it’s critical for contact centers to have the ability to measure adherence in real-time. This way, contact centers are better positioned to understand what causes agents to miss their targets and take the appropriate steps to remedy the problems.
Another 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.
Next, it’s important that agents understand what their adherence goals are. A contact center is a sum of many moving parts, and agents need to realize that taking 10 minutes to check their social networking page may not seem like much, but put together in aggregate among all agents, 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there can throw the entire contact center far off the mark for service levels. Real-time adherence monitoring can help agents better understand how their behavior can directly affect service-level goals, and help them feel like contributors to the success of the contact center.
As the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is especially true in the contact center. Your workforce management solution should be your very best tool, not only for creating effective schedules, but for monitoring and maintaining them, as well.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Patrick Barnard