Adherence to Schedule

[daveste]

Our organization is using Blue Pumpkin for managing our inbound call center staffing. We are looking for a benchmark for “Adherence to Schedule”. Can anyone share their standard, or industry standard that they target?

[Karsten Fuhrmann]

Hello, we have a 97% adherence target. This is giving the agents a buffer of 14.5 minutes per day. Based on my experience, most companies using a target between 90 and 97% - it depends on how much money they want to lose.

[dlexmond]

Hi daveste,

The concept of schedule adherence is a tricky issue. As another response mentioned, the standard is somewhere between 90 and 98 %. You have to be careful interpreting what that means. This standard is really a relative number: it is the time plugged in (numerator) over paid hours minus paid breaks minus absenteeism minus approved off-the-phone time (denominator). So the base against which you measure adherence has already been adjusted to a smaller or larger extent. Depending on how much absenteeism you have, and how many projects and meetings you allow, the true productivity rate (plug in time measured against paid time)is often some number well south of 70 %. So I suggest that this number is more meaningful, because it measures what you get back in productivity relative to what you pay in wages. Of course, you will then have to discount that percentage by your occupancy levels to obtain true productivity.

Hope this makes sense. If you have more questions feel free to e-mail me at dlexmond@callcpm.com.

[ForceGuy]

Just ensure you don't confuse adherence benchmarks vs. compliance benchmarks...depending on which definition you use, compliance measures the "how well an agent follows their schedule". For example, if you agent is scheduled for a 10am-6pm shift, with 15minute breaks at noon and 4pm and a 1/2 lunch at 2pm, compliance would measure how close they were in login in/out at each respective expected login/out (ie: did they logout at 10am for their break then login at 10:15 when they were expected back?). Compliance expectations should vary with AHT...if your operation runs 10~15 minute AHTs a real tight compliance shouldn't be expected...if you're in the 1~2 minute range, then your should increase your expectation.

[Mike Knowles]

Adherence takes into account times that the agent is at work but not doing what they are supposed to be doing (on break when they shouldn't be or not on break when they should be) and absenteeism (missed days, early outs, tardies). Using this premise I would say that 85%-90% is a reasonable goal. This allows the agent to incur a roughly 7% absenteeism rate while still allowing for about 30 minutes of non compliant time everyday.

The absenteeism, while problematic, is not costly. The agent does not earn wages and their absence is usually covered on most intervals by the propensity of WFM tools to schedule just above the forecasted call arrival curve.

The real issue here is the agents compliance with their schedule once they are on the clock. If you are an outsourcer, this time can be very costly indeed (you are paying them to generate $0 in revenue). If you are going to measure this alone, I would say that 95% is a reasonable goal. This still allows for about 30 minutes of noncompliant time everyday (which may be handy if you tend to have long calls in your center that may put an agent over their breaks).