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:

The first, most painful impact is in the average speed of answer, or average length of time a customer would wait before reaching an Agent.  It skyrockets from a 14s average to a 73s average--an extra 59s of delay time per contact.   That is 350 customers per hour, waiting almost a full minute longer to get the service they are seeking.  That may not seem like much, but if your customers are calling to buy something from you, or have a complaint about your service, the propensity for them to hang up and go elsewhere is tremendous.

The other noticeable effect is occupancy (the inverse of idle/available time within any given period).  With 69 Agents, occupancy would be approximately 89%, but when 4 people drop out, occupancy shoots up to 95%, a level that will be painful for those Agents that are actually logged in.

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 as Agents struggle to take breathers between contacts to gather themselves for the next incoming customer.  This causes a precarious cycle of higher workload, and an even worse speed of answer and occupancy than what I've noted here.

You can therefore view the impact of non-adherence by quantifying these 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 your operation.

"I am still not convinced.  Show me the money."

You can also calculate the cost of "time lost", or non-conformance.  Assume, for example, that there is a loss of 30 minutes per day, per Agent, in a contact center that employs 100 Agents.  This 30-minute loss per Agent adds up to about 130 hours a year of lost time.

At even a low average wage rate of $10.00/H, that’s $1,300.00 of lost time per Agent, or $130,000.00 per year for the entire contact center.  Simply vary the lost minutes per day, the wage rate, and the number of Agents in the call center to arrive at what this loss means to your specific operation.

Have you planned for and can you afford such losses in your budget and staff plans?

Barring some unusual methods of implementing a schedule adherence and conformance measure in your contact centers, you will never realize 100% conformance or adherence from your Agents.  You can, however, quantify the potential loss, and it may help you communicate the importance of adherence and conformance to Agents and Supervisors.  You can also justify the tools needed to better track and report it, as well as fund reward programs to provide needed incentives to improve overall adherence.

This concludes Part II of the series.  The next, final instalment will be devoted to methods you can use to develop targets, and we will also discuss methods of implementation.

I look forward to your comments and feedback!  Thank you for reading.