Tips for Improving Schedule Adherence in the Contact Center

One of a call center manager’s most important jobs is the creation of the schedule. The schedule – which is often created inside the company’s workforce management solution --  is the framework that supports the entire contact center operation. Hours of planning, forecasting, studying historical precedent and making educated guesses based on available information goes into it. But the best schedules in the world won’t do you or your customers much good if agents aren’t adhering to the schedule.

Schedule adherence, an important metric for contact centers to track, is simply the percentage of time that customer support agents adhere to their scheduled shifts. The higher the schedule adherence, the more efficiently the contact center is operating. Better efficiency may even enable the contact center to reduce headcount without customer relationships suffering.

So how do you improve adherence? There are a few ways to better the metric.

Determine What’s Causing the Lack of Adherence

It might be the fault of your employees. Perhaps they’re poorly trained, perhaps they’re suffering from a lack of motivation and chronic lateness. If this is the case, some remedial training and performance management is necessary. Consider implementing an incentive system that rewards employees who stick to their schedules.

If agents are trying their best but still can’t stick to schedules, it may be the fault of the schedule. Is it building in realistic amounts of time for breaks, lunches and training sessions? Does the schedule fall apart if one agent calls in sick or is late returning from lunch? If so, you may have a critical lack of flexibility in the schedule.

Give Employees Some Flexibility

Workers who have a little “give” in their schedules are more likely to stick to them. A workforce management and scheduling solution that allows agents to adjust their shift times by 15 minutes to can hour can help improve adherence. In addition, a WFM solution that allows agents with similar skills to swap shifts without a lot of paperwork or managers’ approval can ensure that there are always the right number of people with the right skills handling customer contacts.

Offer Incentives, and Reward Adherence

Given the right incentives, employees will often work hard to improve their own adherence. Give recognition to employees who do a good job sticking to schedules, and provide small rewards to workers who improve their adherence. Punishing tardiness tends to lower morale, so put some positive methods into place to boost the schedule. Employees who are late, for example, can be given the opportunity to make the time up during the busiest shifts when extra help is needed.

Ensure you’re using a good WFM and scheduling solution that can help you build the kind of flexibility you need – and your agents need – to keep to schedule.

Edited by Maurice Nagle