7 Tips for Improved Schedule Adherence in Your Call Center

How do you get your staff to show up for work on time and stick to their planned schedule and break times? This is one of the most challenging jobs related to managing any call center – making sure there is the right number of staff with the right skills available at the right times of the day. Here are seven tips that might be helpful to improve schedule adherence in your call center:

Quantify the implications of missing staff

First, you need to understand the effects of schedule adherence in your call center. This starts with measuring adherence and quantifying the implications on service level, costs and other metrics that are critical for your business. Typically, a lack of adherence results in understaffing and decreased service levels. In order to compensate for this, call centers might increase staffing, which results in higher costs. Here is an example of the cost implications of out-of-adherence.

Set reasonable adherence goals

Identify adherence goals and objectives based on the unique characteristics of your call center environment and also take a look at benchmarks of other call centers. When defining your goals, please consider the following:

Include your staff into this process from the beginning

• Define minimum expectations
• Average handle time of calls
• Identify potential barriers that might prevent adherence

Identify the reasons for attendance and adherence problems
Basically, there are three different reasons for adherence problems:

• Don’t know: the agent may either be unclear about what the expectations are, or they may be unaware of how their behavior is not meeting the expectation. Giving the agent timely feedback can help resolve the problem.
• Can’t: the agent may require more training, although adherence problems are rarely lack of training. More likely there could be a barrier that prevents adherence.
• Won’t: the agent may lack motivation or may be receiving improper consequences. The most effective consequences are: Positive, Immediate, and Certain.

For more details please read this post about schedule adherence challenges.

Identify rewards and consequences that support adherence goals

Reward agents that adhere to their schedule (e.g. 95% within adherence scores) through recognition within the team and tie bonuses to good scores. It is also critical that all agents are aware of the consequences for out-of-adherence behavior; this establishes their responsibility towards the success of the call center.

Communicate the “power of one” to all staff

Emphasize the “power of one” to highlight the importance of every agent’s adherence. Using tables or charts available to make “adherence” visually quantifiable can be helpful. So can activities like “Ball Toss” in which six agents are paired off and given a ball which they must toss back and forth. Replace one person in the pair and keep the toss moving. Then take one person away without providing a replacement to show how quickly understaffing can create stress and dropped balls – which, of course, represent “calls”.

Review your tools to manage and track adherence

Workforce management software helps automate your call center schedule policy adherence tracking and reporting capabilities. Review the tools you have available in your call center and evaluate if you have the need for more sophisticated adherence tracking tools:

• Real-time dashboards
• Alerts and notification
• Adherence reporting by agent, group and center
• Exception management
• Adherence tracking for all activities
• Accurate forecasting of call center volumes
• Automated scheduling
• Measure and monitor

You can only manage what you measure.

Make adherence monitoring & reporting and the regular review with your team part of your staff meetings with help from call center workforce management software. Over time, the whole team will more and more appreciate the importance of adherence and it will get “internalized” into your service culture. For more detailed information on how to improve adherence in a call center, please read this whitepaper “Strategies for improving Schedule Adherence”.