by Bill Durr, Principal Global Solutions Consultant, Verint® Witness Actionable SolutionsTM
Contact center managers have long recognized the impact that agent adherence to schedule has on customer wait times. Since adherence variations often produce large swings in wait times—and longer delays are associated with unhappy customers—operations teams go to great lengths to manage adherence. But how much adherence is reasonable?
Most centers realize that the closer agents perform to the schedules, the better the overall service level will be. But there is a cost associated with policing minor violations of the schedule. For example, if an agent comes back from lunch two minutes late, is it worth the effort to track and react to such a small deviation from the schedule?
To police schedule violations, most forecasting and scheduling software includes real-time adherence screens with flexible parameters that flag schedule violations with a variance of more than, say, five minutes. Nevertheless, many centers set adherence goals between 90 and 95 percent. What this means in practice is that agents who work an eight-hour day can be as much as 48 minutes out of adherence (in the case of a 90 percent goal) or as few as 24 minutes out of adherence (in the case of a 95 percent goal). A few centers even demand 100 percent adherence to schedule.
Managing Schedule Exceptions
The debate isn’t really whether one goal or the other is more beneficial. The debate centers around the secondary effect of these goals—the administration of schedule exceptions.
Suppose an agent is scheduled to handle telephone calls, but his supervisor pulls him off the phones for some one-on-one coaching. A schedule adherence violation will be recorded. Since supervisors are frequently goaled on their team’s schedule adherence and the agent is definitely goaled on adherence, both parties are motivated to make sure the violation is resolved so as not to count against them.
To accomplish this, the workforce management team must have people available to amend schedules and resolve “acceptable” schedule violations. This can get messy. If the team has institutionalized a 95 percent adherence goal, it will need to dedicate considerable time to the schedule exception process. Moreover, the supervisors and agents will focus on ensuring that the positive adherence violations are treated separately from the negative.
A New Approach
A new approach to schedule adherence uses the adherence screen itself to provide deeper insight into the problem. The adherence screen is typically a display showing which agents are out of adherence, and for how long. When a supervisor pulls an agent off the phones for an unscheduled coaching session, the agent’s name is displayed in red while a clock counts the minutes and seconds the agent has deviated from the assigned task. When he returns to the phones, his name disappears from the screen. This is the fundamental problem with real-time adherence screens—they are ephemeral.
Some workforce management solutions provide a second view into schedule adherence. This is a sideways-scrollable view through the earlier part of the day and week, enabling the workforce management team and supervisors to view behaviors over time. It’s such a powerful view that the adherence screen is moving from the workforce management team into the front line, allowing supervisors to engage in silent monitoring in real time or listen to previously recorded conversations by merely clicking through the adherence screen. This capability enables them and workforce management analysts to determine whether the schedule violation is a positive or negative instance.
And now, the most advanced forecasting and scheduling solutions use adherence screens to provide additional insight into how agents navigate their desktop applications. This breakthrough shows more than which application happens to be open on the agent’s desktop: It captures handling time as agents move through applications, screen by screen and field by field.
It can show, for example, that Bill spends too much time on the data collection screen, perhaps indicating some training issues that voice monitoring can’t reveal. Additionally, this powerful capability enables us to track the transaction times for employees who never use the phone, such as back-office and branch workers. Armed with this insight, contact centers can make intelligent decisions about their processes and workforce—a strategic advantage not provided by traditional adherence monitoring software.
About the Author
Bill Durr is principal global solutions consultant for Verint® Witness Actionable SolutionsTM, a worldwide leader in software and services that help businesses capture customer intelligence and optimize their workforce performance. With over 20 years of experience in the contact center industry, he is the author of articles and books on contact center technology and management and speaks frequently on industry-related topics.