The Importance of Schedule Adherence on the Customer Experience

Schedule adherence, or the metric that reveals whether call center agents are adhering to their assignments, is one of the most important metrics in the call center. Schedules aren’t much good to anyone if they’re not being followed, so it makes sense to track adherence for a variety of reasons.

A Lack of Adherence Increases Internal Inefficiency

Adherence is one of the primary tools call center managers have to achieve labor efficiencies and improve the customer experience. Tracking adherence can uncover a variety of problems, such as agents who are showing up late or clocking out early, inefficiencies in business processes that are leading to extended after-call wrap-up work, or meetings or coaching sessions that are running long. While logging in five minutes late may not seem like a big deal, multiplying those five minutes by a dozen or more agents in a large call center can throw off schedules by hours, and this time is very difficult to make up.

Tracking adherence can ultimately lead to improving the scheduling process itself. (In other words, it may not be the agents who are the problem, but the person who is building unrealistic schedules.) Only by tracking adherence and conformance (adherence’s twin) can contact center identify the precise causes of schedule inefficiencies.

The Effects on the Customer Experience

While a lack of adherence can cause havoc in internal processes, companies should also worry how it can affect customer relationships. Low adherence rates almost always result in poor customer service due to long waits on hold, transfers and a lack of the right skills to solve customers’ issues. Poor adherence can affect the customer relationship most heavily during shift changes. If one or more agents show up to a new shift late, they’re not on the phone when they should be. Even a few minutes of missed shift time can increase hold times in a way that throws out the schedule for the rest of the day, and customers unfortunate enough to call during these times can have a poor experience.

Cloud-based workforce management solutions can easily uncover every moment when agents are out of adherence and pinpoint the precise causes. In addition to adherence and conformance, they can also track shrinkage, or the amount of time agents are on the clock but not on the phones. Better measurement of schedule metrics leads to better scheduling, better workforce management and a better customer experience.

Edited by Maurice Nagle