Schedule Adherence & Conformance, Part II: Impacts to the Contact Center

In Part I, Introductions & Definitions, we introduced ourselves to adherence and conformance--the qualitative and quantitative sides of fulfilment for workforce management forecasts and schedules.   In this instalment, we get into more detail about financial and service implications for the contact center.

It's just a few minutes here and there.  What's the big deal?

The table below shows what happens when we have 350 contacts per hour with an average handle time (AHT) of 320 seconds (or 62 agents worth of workload).  Let’s assume we had planned to have 69 Agents 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, 4 people) are not adhering to their work schedule during this period?  Note what happens with 65 staff in place:

Schedule Adherence & Conformance, Part I: Introduction & Definitions

Dubious management of schedule adherence and conformance can disengage employees, impact customer satisfaction, and cost serious amounts of cash.  That's fancy-talk for "we could all be out of a job".  This series of posts is aimed at helping contact center professionals grasp the fundamentals of adherence and conformance, and outline a roadmap for successful implementation (or correction), and control.

Schedule adherence and conformance management is tantamount to forecast and schedule accuracy, in that it is a set of metrics that measures the quality of actual work versus a pre-determined plan, i.e. schedules developed to cover forecast requirements.

Simply put, even with accurate forecasts and effective schedules, if your Agents' adherence and conformance results are below an acceptable threshold, you're going to miss your service targets, and send customers packing for another less-frustrating service option...namely, a competitor.