Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Poor Schedule Adherence Costs Contact Centers Money and Customers
Many contact center managers pride themselves on their brilliant schedules. Whether they’re using spreadsheets and manual algorithms or workforce management solutions, they may be delighted with the bold, efficient schedules they’ve worked out for their contact centers. The problem arises when these schedules are actually put into play: often, adherence is low, essentially making the schedule useless.
Schedule adherence, of course, is the percentage of time agents spend doing what they’ve been assigned to do, including not only work time, but lunches, breaks, meetings, training, performance evaluation and more. A low adherence score means that agents are out of schedule alignment a significant portion of the day. Essentially, it also means that when customers need them, these agents aren’t there to serve them. No schedule can be considered worth anything if schedule adherence is regularly lower than 90 to 95 percent, which is what best-practices contact centers consider good adherence.
It’s a fact that being out of adherence costs companies money. According to a recent article by Benchmark Portal’s Bruce Belfiore and Kamál Webb, poor adherence can be surprisingly expensive for a contact center.
“We can calculate that a single agent who is regularly ‘short’ on work-time adherence by 20 minutes per day throughout the year, costs the company 83 hours of lost work and $1,000 in wages (based upon an avg. $12/hr.),” they write. “This extrapolates to nearly 1,000 customer calls not handled by that agent over that same period!”
Despite the financial implications of a lack of adherence, research has found that only 71 percent of contact centers track or follow adherence to schedule, and only 66 percent of those companies are using commercial workforce management systems which make it easier to monitor adherence and make adjustments when schedules go out of alignment. Forty-two percent of contact centers surveyed revise their workforce schedules as required, without established intervals; 20 percent of respondents revise schedules on a monthly basis, 15 percent revise on a quarterly-basis, and only four percent revise weekly.
While it’s important to get agents to understand the importance of sticking to schedules, human employees are always going to be imperfect. By using a state-of-the-art scheduling solution, contact centers can pursue a more effective strategy: monitor in real-time and make immediate adjustments in order to get back in adherence.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi