welcome to managing metrics a series of videos highlighting contact center metrics that matter
to managers i'm bruce belfiore ceo of benchmark portal here to talk to you about schedule
adherence in this video we will define schedule adherence talk about why it's important how it
is calculated mention an industry average for the metric and explain impacts that schedule adherence
can have on your operations this video is brought to you by benchmark portal the source for contact
center training certification benchmarking and consulting if you like this video please
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free educational content just like this schedule adherence is an efficiency metric that measures
the percentage of time agents are actually following the schedules they have been given
it is calculated as a percentage and usually comes directly from your workforce management system
to illustrate if an agent logs in and out of the system and properly uses aux codes throughout the
workday exactly as scheduled then the agent will have 100 schedule adherence if however an agent
arrives to the office late and logs into the shift nine minutes after scheduled shift start
that agent is out of adherence by nine minutes for someone working a shift that is 450 minutes long
this nine minute reduction would reduce their adherence by two percent naturally this is
a negative occurrence that takes nine minutes away from being available to do productive work
there are good situations where lack of adherence is due to agents providing service to customers
for example if agents miss the beginning of a break because they are finishing up long calls
after all we don't want agents rushing customers off the phone just to adhere to their scheduled
break time in practice and for purposes of benchmarking only time out of schedule which
robs the center of productive available time is considered time out of adherence
systems will generally allow someone who goes into break five minutes late due to a long
call to tap back in five minutes later than scheduled to make up for the late start here
the agent logged in late at the start of the shift and was late coming back from lunch
and break indicated in red this time was not made up and is the time considered against adherence
the green text shows where the agent was late leaving for a break and a coaching session due
to serving a caller but this time was made up on the back end so the green numbers are not counted
against adherence over the course of the day the agent was 58 minutes out of schedule
however only 32 minutes was a loss of productive time therefore 7.62 of the day was lost time
due to adherence issues adherence is thus 100 percent minus 7.62 or 92.38 percent in
adherence this metric should also be calculated for the entire center to determine how well
your center is performing overall and to analyze where lost time might be gained
some centers use elaborate exception reporting processes to eliminate penalties on a case-by-case
basis others skip this process and instead create acceptable parameters for adherence that
agents must follow and require supervisors or team leads to monitor the adherence of their agents to
identify substandard behavior and separate it from behavior which contributes to good service some
centers give a grace period of a minute or more for logins before they counted against the agent
that is a point of management discretion if you have a workforce management system but do not
currently receive adherence in your reports check with your vendor to get this report activated
if you do not have a workforce management system you can obtain adherence manually by taking the
total amount of logged in time from the acd and comparing it to the total schedule time
so using the previous example a simple calculation for adherence can be
made by taking 388 minutes logged in and dividing by 420 minutes scheduled
tracking this metric is time well spent because agents who do not log in at their assigned times
cause the speed of answer metric to worsen for the center which is a known dissatisfier for customers
this can also stress other agents who do follow the rules but cq times lengthen due
to non-adherent team members our benchmark portal database indicates that across all industries 90
adherence is fairly normal however to understand whether your adherence metric is appropriate or
not for you you should benchmark it against your own industry sector ultimately optimizing schedule
adherence is important for optimizing staffing levels and productivity if you feel your agents
lack appreciation for the importance of adherence please talk to us about certified training of
agents supervisors and coaches this can help you get buy-in for optimizing schedule adherence and
other metrics and now a couple of questions for you on adherence do you have schedule adherence
goals set for your department and if so are you meeting them regularly if not why not please write
your answer and any other comments below we'd love for you to share your thoughts and ideas with the
community of contact center experts who regularly visit us here you can also find links to some of
our other valuable resources in the description below and don't forget to like and subscribe to
our channel to get great content delivered to you so good luck optimizing your schedule adherence