How Adherence Can Go Awry

Considerations for New Adherence Programs

By Ethan Bryant, Eleveo

It’s undeniable that schedule adherence can rapidly help organizations realize an ROI on their WFM solution investment.  It has a demonstrated and measurable impact on organizations, especially those that may never have tracked adherence in the past. Those organizations often show marked improvements in service levels without increasing staffing levels.

That said, there are difficulties associated with establishing a schedule adherence process within an organization, any of which may cause delays in realizing the financial benefits. Some could derail the program altogether.  Understanding and preparing for these potential obstacles can do much to mitigate them.

Let’s review some ways to avoid difficulties associated with deploying schedule adherence.

Understanding the Goal: Evaluating the Status Quo

When initially planning their schedule adherence roll-out, organizations are understandably eager to establish an adherence goal. After all, a goal provides a key metric for measuring success and driving improvement.

Arbitrary goals, however, can have the opposite effect. An overly ambitious goal may discourage or demoralize a team, while too modest a goal may actually encourage the behaviors you’re hoping to reduce.  With this in mind, it’s wise — especially for teams new to adherence — to evaluate the present state and to examine agents’ activities and contact center processes before developing a goal.

After all, announcing an adherence program sends a very specific message to your agents: following the schedule is important to you. Ask these questions:

• Is this message reinforced by the work you assign them?
• Do your supervisors and team leads consistently reinforce it?
• What about your corporate culture?  Will it embrace adherence or find it abrasive?
• How accepting will your organization be of occasional adherence lapses, such as restroom breaks outside of scheduled breaks?   

Answering these questions can help categorize and quantify shrinkage — the activities and exceptions that take your agents off the phone when you have them scheduled to take calls, emails, or chats.

As an example, let’s take the first question: whether or not the work you’ve assigned your agents aligns with the adherence program you want to institute.

Some contact centers require agents to perform multiple duties throughout the day in addition to answering calls.  These duties may include calling vendors, providers, or others for additional information, or perhaps agents are expected to do customer call-backs and make updates to the CRM system. While these duties may be essential, they require agents to take themselves out of the queue, which compromises forecast accuracy and makes calculating adherence difficult.  Moreover, organizations might make their adherence goals overly lenient
in an attempt to build tolerance for off-queue activities into their schedules, opening the door to potentially undesirable behaviors and outcomes.

One potential remedy is scheduling these “off phone” activities for specific times within the day. Organizations could specify the amount of time each day agents can log off the phone. These times should be scheduled to optimize agent activities based on call demands and service level goals.

Another option might be establishing a distinct team or individual to handle these off-phone activities, perhaps rotating this specialized role throughout the team to prevent burnout.

The objective is to remove as much ambiguity as possible.  Schedule adherence holds an agent accountable to a series of activities at specific times, and clarifying expectations is the best way to set realistic adherence goals.

Understanding the Goal: Tolerance for Exceptions

It’s essential to keep in mind that while there will always be exceptions to the rule, the more exceptions you allow the less meaningful the rule.

Below are a variety of situations that an agent may encounter during a workweek:

• They get a call right before their break and must resolve the customer issue prior to ending the call.  Because they went to break late, they also return late, causing an out-of-adherence event.
• They are stopped in the hallway on the way back from a scheduled meeting and asked a question by the supervisor, making them a few minutes late returning to the phone.
• They need an unscheduled restroom break between their break and lunch.
• They were held up in traffic and arrived late to work.
• They needed to log out of the queue to take an urgent personal call.

Some of these situations are driven by the nature of contact center work, while others are more matters of human nature.  Regardless, we can’t hold agents to an unrealistic 100% adherence goal, and we must understand what situations are driving out-of-adherence events. The closer we define our tolerance for each situation, the better we can calculate a goal.

Because being caught on a call or chat before break or lunch is likely to be the most frequent (and most acceptable) reason for an out-of-adherence event, it warrants the most attention.  Most contact centers prefer agents handle each customer engagement to its conclusion, even if it means going to and returning from lunch or break late. Or they may ask an unengaged agent to log out early for break to avoid getting a call that may run into their scheduled break time.

It’s important to consider the average handle time (AHT) for the team in question; it’s often the primary factor in setting the adherence goal for that team.  After all, a team with a three-minute AHT may have agents far more likely to meet a 96% adherence goal.  A group with a 15-or-20-minute AHT may merit a more lenient goal, given that it’s much more likely their calls could encroach into a break or lunch.

Regarding the other situations listed, the question may simply be: what is your current culture and how lenient do you wish to be?

It’s important to consider corporate culture when rolling out adherence because, in some organizations, it could dramatically increase attrition.  Keep in mind, however, that events such as the ones listed will probably not occur every day. Your adherence percentage should be a metric viewed over the course of weeks or even months rather than over the course of a specific day.  Even the most diligent agents may find themselves falling below a perfectly reasonable adherence goal in a single day due to events beyond their control.

When our overachiever first approaches leadership with the initial concern, it’s an opportunity to educate agents about why the adherence goal isn’t 100%.  The difference between 100% and your actual goal represents the “breathing room” you’re giving your agents so they can do their job effectively in the real world, with all its unpredictability.

Understanding the Goal: What the Percentage Means

So just what is the impact of increasing or decreasing an adherence goal by even 1%?

To understand, it’s important to first investigate how your WFM solution provider calculates adherence.  Most software solutions calculate adherence strictly on the scheduled work activity (defined here as scheduled time to be available to take contacts).  Assuming this is the case, let’s take a look at a typical example:

In the example below, the sample agent works 7 ½ hours, which equates to 450 minutes.  If the adherence goal is 95%, then calculating how much out-of-adherence time an agent is allowed is simply a matter of multiplying .05 x 450 (Note: .05 is selected because of the difference between the desired goal of 95% and 100%).  Based on that calculation, this particular agent may be out of adherence for up to 22.5 minutes and remain within their adherence goal.

It’s important to note that the amount of time would decrease for a part-time agent or an agent with significant portions of their day allotted to off-phone activities (such as meetings or trainings).  In those cases, the calculation would only apply to actual on-phone work time.

Now consider:

• How likely are your agents to get a call just before or near their break or lunch?
  • If they do, how much time would this likely account for, based on AHT?
  • Is this something very likely to occur, or just on occasion?
• Are there acceptable work activities that would take your agents out of queue during scheduled work times?
  • Is it possible to calculate an “acceptable” average time per day for these activities?
• Are there other daily activities you want to include in your list of “acceptable” or “tolerable?”

Keep in mind that some enterprising agents will eventually calculate how much time they can take off the phone each day while still achieving their adherence goal.

Finally, while the above assumes your WFM solution calculates based on the work activity only, it is always worth your time to investigate whether this is true for your specific solution.  Your WFM solution may either differ slightly or offer options that allow you to customize this calculation.

Change Management: Why Exceptions Should be Avoided

It’s a given that no agent — no matter how good — will consistently achieve 100% schedule adherence. Nonetheless,
it’s often the very human drive to achieve 100% that starts contact centers down the treacherous path of setting adherence exceptions.

The employee who attempts to game the system is less the issue than your best employee – the overachiever.  That employee will inevitably come up to you at some point and say, “But I did what I was supposed to do.  I stayed on the phone and helped the customer, even when it was my break.  Why am I being penalized for this?”

From their perspective, your new adherence system may be forcing unfair choices: either shorten their break or accept an imperfect adherence score. That can upset those who pride themselves on their performance and want to see it reflected in the data.  For their part, leadership tends to empathize with these employees, and they begin considering either using exceptions or moving the break.

Unfortunately, if you do this for an overachieving employee, you have to do it for everyone.  Before too long, you may find yourself spending much of your time processing exceptions or adjusting schedules rather than motivating agents to strive to adhere to the schedules you’ve set for them.  Not only will it rob your WFM team of valuable time, but it also compels agents to spend time documenting and relaying these exceptions to the team for processing.

This isn’t to say that exceptions should never be allowed.  A classic example of a valid exception is a Fire Drill.  In this circumstance, all employees must leave immediately, and most will find themselves out of adherence.  In such cases, exceptions are entirely justified and are often easily added en masse within the WFM software solution.  Exceptions, though, should be rare and the circumstances driving them considered and documented to ensure consistency.

When our overachiever first approaches leadership with the initial concern, it’s an opportunity to educate agents about why the adherence goal isn’t 100%.  The difference between 100% and your actual goal represents the “breathing room” you’re giving your agents so they can do their job effectively in the real world, with all its unpredictability.

Change Management: Sell Adherence Within Your Organization

Far too often, schedule adherence is associated with the Orwellian phrase “Big Brother.”  After all, you’re literally monitoring an agent’s every change in work status.  Agents who were already adhering to their schedule may feel some resentment.  They may view it as punitive or as a lack of trust. These feelings are valid and have often caused new adherence programs to falter or fail. They need to be addressed.

It’s critical to ensure agents understand the reason behind adherence and its benefits to both the organization and the agents themselves.  Adherence helps ensure that all of the work you’ve put into crafting schedules to have the right person is in the right place at the right time actually means something.  The purpose of workforce management is, after all, to meet customer demand as efficiently as possible.

How does schedule adherence benefit the agent?   An optimized schedule benefits everyone by lowering occupancy.  This is important to the employee experience since high, sustained occupancy often leads to higher burnout, attrition, and employee dissatisfaction.  Adherence also helps identify those employees that adhere to their schedules while holding those that don’t adhere accountable.

At the End of the Day…

In the end, adherence is far more than just a metric your WFM solution produces daily for each of your agents.  It is a process and a set of procedures tailored to fit the individual needs of your contact center that requires careful implementation.  It may be a cultural shift that requires encouragement, time, and, most of all, consistent messaging, from all levels of leadership, to succeed. However, success begins with a thorough understanding of the adherence metric, as well as a structured and comprehensive plan to introduce and incorporate it within your organization.

Ethan Bryant is Manager of Training & Consulting, Americas, for Eleveo.  He may be reached at ethan.bryant@eleveo.com.
For more information about Eleveo, please go to www.eleveo.com.