Newsletters

Customer Support:   (972) 395-3225

Home

Articles, News, Announcements - click Main News Page
Previous Story       Next Story
    
Quantifying the Impact of Schedule Adherence

by Penny Reynolds, The Call Center School - May 13, 2014

Quantifying the Impact of Schedule Adherence

By Penny Reynolds, The Call Center School

It’s just a few minutes a day for a few agents in your call center. What’s the big deal?

Can you quantify the impact that a lack of schedule adherence has on your call center?

This article will offer several approaches for putting some numbers to your schedule adherence or lack of it.

Impact on Service, Occupancy, and Cost

The table below shows what happens when we have 350 calls per hour with an average handle time of 320 seconds (or 62 erlangs of workload). Let’s assume we had planned to have 69 bodies in chairs to handle those calls in order to deliver an ASA of less than 20 seconds. What happens if just 5% of our staff (in this case, just 4 people) are not adhering to their work schedule during this period? Note what happens with 65 staff in place.

Erlangs

Staff

ASA

Extra Tel Time

Extra Tel Cost/Hour

Occupancy

62

69

14

-

-

89%

62

68

21

7

$4.08

91%

62

67

30

16

$9.33

93%

62

66

45

31

$18.08

94%

62

65

73

59

$34.41

95%

Service Impact

The first impact is the obvious degradation of service, dropping from a 14 second ASA to a 73 second ASA, an extra 59 seconds of delay time per call. This delay is certainly an impact that will be felt by the caller. While the difference between 69 and 68 people is not significant – only a 7 second difference – the impact with just one or two more peple missing is substantial. When measuring “the power of one” difference between 65 and 66 people in seats, it’s a difference of an extra 28 seconds per call!

Occupancy Impact

With 69 staff in place the occupancy would be a reasonable level of 89%, meaning that during the time the agents are logged in and available, they’d be busy on a call 89% of the time and then waiting idle the other 11%, just getting a breather in between calls. However, when 4 people drop out, occupancy shoots up to 95%, a level that will be painful for those people that are actually on the phones. With only 4 people (only 5% of the workforce) missing, everybody’s idle time or “breathing room” will be cut in half!

Call Center Costs

Finally, with 4 people missing, there’s an extra 59 seconds or almost a minute of extra delay time. This not only impacts customer perception but hits our bottom line as well. With an extra minute of time on all 350 calls due to queue time, we’ll be paying the phone company almost $35 per hour extra for the time our callers are waiting.

This situation is worsened by the fact that as delays increase and occupancy rises, the talk time and after-call work time will likely go up, causing a higher workload, and an even worse speed of answer, occupancy, and cost increase than what we’ve noted here. Therefore, you can view the impact of non-adherence as these three detrimental effects, or you can simply plan for the loss in the shrinkage calculation and pad in the needed extra staff. Either way, there’s a significant cost to the center.

Other Approaches

Another way to look at the impact of non-adherence is to calculate the “lost time” cost. Assume that there is a loss of 15 minutes per day per agent in a call center that houses 100 staff. This 15-minute loss per person adds up to about 65 hours a year of lost time. At an average cost of only $10 per hour, that’s over $650 of lost time per person, or $65,000 for the entire center. Simply vary the lost minutes per day, the wage rate, and the number of seats in the call center to arrive at what this loss means to your center.

Conclusion

Regardless of how you add up the numbers, the end result is the same – poor adherence costs you money. Quantifying the loss may help you communicate the importance of adherence to frontline staff and supervisors. It can also help justify the tools needed to better track and report it, as well as fund reward programs to provide needed incentives to improve overall adherence.

Do you want to learn more about quantifying the effects of poor adherence and strategies for improving the adherence rate in your call center? Join The Call Center School for a 90-minute web seminar called Attendance and Adherence Strategies: Getting and Keeping Bodies in Seats. To learn more, visit www.thecallcenterschool.com or call 615-812-8400.

About the Author

Penny Reynolds is a Co-Founder and Senior Partner of The Call Center School, a company specializing in the professional development of call center personnel from frontline agents to call center executives. She is a popular speaker at industry conferences and writes frequently for call center industry publications. She is the author of five books: Call Center Staffing: The Complete, Practical Guide to Workforce Management, Business School Essentials for Call Center Leaders, Call Center Supervision: The Complete Guide to Managing Frontline Staff, Power Phrasing, and The Power of One. She may be reached at: penny.reynolds@thecallcenterschool.com or at 615-812-8410.


 
Return to main news page