“Adherence” is another term, like “Shrinkage” that is thrown around the contact centre industry a great deal. It is held up as a crucial measuring tool and one that indicates how well an agent and the contact centre as a whole is performing.
However, what exactly is adherence? Should it play such a critical role in measuring success in contact centres and how can organisations better manage it?
Put very simply, contact centre adherence is used to determine whether contact centre agents are doing the tasks they’ve been scheduled to do, when they’ve been scheduled to do it. It is measured by taking the total time a contact centre agent is available for call work and dividing it by the time they are scheduled to work.
Adherence = (minutes in adherence ÷ scheduled minutes) x 100
The availability part of adherence takes into account other activity agents undertake during a shift that is not call related. This might be time spent on breaks, non-call related work, over running meetings etc.
So, the example below outlines possible events that may impact an agent’s ability to hit their adherence target during one shift –
an agent arrives for their shift five minutes late due to personal reasons
as a result, they then log onto the system five minutes late
later in the shift they are on a longer than expected call and as a result are 10 minutes late for training
which then means they are on their lunch break 10 minutes later than scheduled
This rather unfortunate, but not untypical day, would mean that this particular agent is 30 minutes out of adherence for that one shift. On the face of it a poor day and in all likelihood, would be pulled aside by their manager and talked to about their poor adherence. This level of agent monitoring has been seen as crucial in ensuring contact centres are delivering efficient customer service. It is also, however, a reason why there is such employee churn in the contact centre industry. The lack of flexibility and monitoring that takes little ‘other factors’ into account, makes some contact centres unappealing places to work.
Just taking the example above, there could be a whole number of reasons for the agent being late, having the ability to check in remotely and/or update supervisors as to their ETA could make a real difference. Ideally, the agent could see that the call volumes means that being a little late to deal with a personal issue won’t impact customer service, and that staying on five minutes later at the end of the shift might actually be beneficial.
Equally, spending 10 minutes extra on the overrunning call might mean that the issue is dealt with in one call, rather than a customer having to phone back, ticking another contact centre tick box, first call resolution. Rather than measuring schedule adherence a better way might be to measure the amount of time the agent was available during the busiest periods of the day.
Some questions you should ask yourself while considering adherence is – What is your real Adherence target? Why is it set at that level? Are you working towards the correct adherence target – have you got your Target Typology correct?
Target typology – some targets are about how close to perfect we can be, how high we can go, how long we can go. Others are Yes/No or Pass/Fail figures, some are zero tolerance measures. How you treat adherence is important
If your current Adherence target is 90%, what does that actually mean? You have to be careful to understand it correctly otherwise you’ll promote a whole host of unwanted negative behaviours.
Example – most businesses act like this means that the target for adherence is 90%. In other words, 90% adherence is the goal behaviour. That means that in a 7-and-a-half hour shift, an agent’s goal is to be out of adherence for 45 minutes. The problem with a target goal in this scenario is that you could have an agent who has adhered to their schedule for 95% of the day so far and thinks they can let things slip for the rest of the day – Which would not be the desired scenario.
This demonstrates how it is important to differentiate between your adherence target and your adherence tolerance.
Intraday automation allows contact centres to make a real difference to adherence targets, by allowing more flexibility and increasing better levels of customer service. Adherence targets are based on the schedule put together, often six weeks ahead of time. Any incidents that change a shift’s schedule (influx of calls, personal issues, over running meetings etc), cannot be taken into account in a forward plan. Therefore, the adherence targets may not reflect reality. Intraday automation continually monitors likely peaks and troughs of calls and can therefore allow agents more flexibility to take time to deal with issues, knowing that it won’t impact customer service levels.
It also means that training can be rescheduled to other parts of the shift where call levels are intelligently predicted to be low meaning that agents can focus on high call periods of the day without worrying about being late for training.
Scheduling and adherence will remain an important part of the contact centre industry. However, in an age where the sector as a whole is under pressure to change working environments, making them more attractive for agents, intraday automation can play an important role in helping making adherence targets more reflective of actual need, rather than a predicated, typical shift.