by Bob Webb, Pipkins, Inc. - March 25, 2013

Three Things You Need to Know About Agent Adherence

By: Bob Webb, Pipkins, Inc.

Call centers walk a tight rope between profit and loss and many factors impact that balance. Agent adherence is an inherent problem for call centers and can be insidious, but significant. When agents arrive late or leave early, log in to the wrong queue, take unscheduled lunch and breaks, or get tied up on customer calls during scheduled breaks or lunches, the result can be abandoned calls, irate customers, lost sales, and an inability to meet service levels. The balance between under- and overstaffing can easily be affected by agent adherence. Once a customer is lost to poor customer service, it may be impossible to ever regain their business.

Monitoring adherence on a real-time basis can identify problems in early stages to permit corrective action to be taken before service levels plummet. Call center supervisors need preventative strategies for adherence violations. If only a few agents are out of compliance, overall performance probably will not be compromised. But if too many agents are out of adherence for too long, the results can be catastrophic.

Real-time adherence tools can help by automatically alerting managers when agents are out of compliance. This makes it possible to flag minor lapses before they turn into major crises. Supervisors can view adherence status at any time in a special window that is refreshed every 30 seconds or on the timetable of the user’s choice. When an agent’s “state” does not match the schedule, the system typically spotlights the discrepancy by a visual device such as color-coding. The more comprehensive systems arm supervisors with important additional information by indicating the nature of the violation (e.g. late start, improper activity, logged out early) as well as the agent’s current state (e.g. ACD inbound, logged off, after-call work), and the duration of the problem.

There are three things you need to know to achieve optimal adherence:

1. Understand the Root Cause of Adherence Violations

Numbers can be misleading. Verify that an agent who appears to have fallen below the center’s adherence targets in a given week or month has not become a victim of someone’s failure to record exceptions in the schedule. A supervisor may have neglected to log an illness-related absence, a switch in lunch schedules, or a reassignment from phone to email duty. Or, perhaps call volume was twice what was expected, causing planned meetings to be cancelled. For these reasons, it is important to review adherence slip-ups with agents before taking punitive action.

2. Be Realistic When Setting Adherence Goals

Typically, adherence goals should be in the 90% to 95% range, meaning agents should be engaged in scheduled activities 90-95% of the time over the course of a week or a month. This allows latitude for minor scheduling oversights and unforeseen developments. Attempting to force 100% compliance will backfire, both by alienating agents and by tacitly encouraging them to end calls prematurely in order to meet adherence targets.

3. Allow for Grace Periods

Adherence rules should include grace periods that must be observed before the agent is deemed to be out of compliance. It is impractical to take punitive action against an agent for returning to their desk at 2:02 instead of 2:00. Being too rigid will affect morale and customer service. Different thresholds should be established for different activities. A late start at the beginning of a shift or a late return from lunch may have a grace period of 2 minutes, while a late lunch start may have a grace period of 5 minutes. These policies can accommodate the realities of call center work where an agent scheduled to go on break at 10:00 am may be delayed by a call received at 9:59.

The best option for monitoring adherence is a visual system that allows for at-a-glance agent monitoring. This system frees supervisors from sitting at desks and enables one-click edits. A system that centralizes the process by monitoring multiple call center sites takes efficiency one step further. Adherence levels for each center are displayed on a single color-coded map with a point-and-click drilldown to individual sites, enabling system-wide oversight by a single analyst. A global monitoring system can be used to track multiple in-house contact centers as well as monitor the performance of outsourced call centers. Adherence violations at any contact center in the network can be instantly spotted and investigated with a click from a map that portrays each center’s location and its compliance levels graphically instead of through text-heavy reports.

Global adherence monitoring tools reduce overhead for multi-site contact center operations by enabling a single, centrally located analyst to oversee adherence monitoring for all sites. The designated analyst can monitor all contact center facilities from a single screen and alert local centers to compliance problems, eliminating the need for local monitoring as well as freeing local center supervisors to focus on other activities.

The goal of real-time adherence monitoring is to reduce unproductive time by keeping agents in their seats when they’re supposed to be. The value of a schedule depends entirely on how well agents follow it. Inadvertent and even deliberate violations are inevitable. The best defense is a good offense and for many call centers, agent adherence systems are the answer.

About Pipkins

Pipkins, Inc. is a leading supplier of workforce management software and services to the call center industry. Pipkins’ RTA Global for multi-site operations simplifies agent adherence monitoring by tracking the vital signs of each center in in-house or outsourced networks with a few visual cues and one control panel to cover all sites. RTA Global reduces expenses, makes adherence easier to manage, and helps increase the productivity of local centers by relieving them of most monitoring responsibilities. Vantage Point, Pipkins’ premier product, is the most accurate forecasting and scheduling tool on the market and forecasts and schedules more than 300,000 agents in over 500 locations across all industries worldwide. For more information, visit www.Pipkins.com.