Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - October 2008
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Proven tactics for getting agents in their seats and keeping them there.
When contact center professionals speak of the classic challenge of “getting the right people in the right place at the right time,” they are largely referring to workforce management — accurately forecasting contact volume and scheduling accordingly. However, even in centers with stellar forecasting and scheduling processes in place, there is no guarantee that the agents who have been scheduled to meet the expected demand will actually be in the right place at the right time.
Since the inception of call centers, agent absenteeism and adherence (or lack thereof) to schedule have caused many a manager to yank out their own hair and/or bang their head on walls, desks and other solid office surfaces. Who can blame them? After all, the ability to accurately and consistently predict the number of calls a center will receive and to determine just the right number of staff required is both an art and a science — and to watch art and science be overridden by agent absence or tardiness is enough to undo even the most patient professional.
But high absenteeism and poor adherence are not symptoms of undesirable agents, rather of undesirable environments. More often than not, centers that consistently struggle to get and keep scheduled “butts in seats” find themselves in that situation because they have failed to properly prepare agents for the work at hand and/or to create an environment that makes agents want to show up and stay seated.
Present and Accounted for
Keeping agent absenteeism and schedule adherence problems to a minimum is an art in itself — one that requires a delicate balance of clear communication, fair policy and creative strategy. No contact center manager can expect every agent to be exactly where they are supposed to be at every minute of every day — staff often have valid reasons for not showing up to work or for not being in place and plugged in when expected. That said, the most successful and forward thinking contact centers have created an environment where agents fully understand and respect the importance of achieving high marks in attendance and adherence, and, more importantly, where agents feel engaged and inspired to actually do so.
Here are some of the specific attributes that centers with low absenteeism and out-of-adherence have in common:
They emphasize the critical importance of attendance and adherence throughout the hiring and on-boarding process.
From tactful messages when recruiting to more detailed explanations during interviews and new-hire training, top centers educate would-be agents about the impact that each one’s attendance and adherence has on the customer experience, the company and each other.
As Gina Szabo, president of Szabo Marketing International and a certified associate of ICMI, explains, “Solid attendance and adherence to schedule requires a holistic approach that needs to start even before we bring people through the door. The call center’s philosophy and emphasis on adherence and attendance needs to be understood and accepted by agents from the get-go. Unfortunately, many call centers miss that piece.”
Szabo reminds managers not only to clearly communicate the contact center’s emphasis on attendance and adherence, but also to evaluate each candidate’s work ethic and their values regarding the topic. “During the recruiting and assessment stages, you need to gauge how likely each person you are considering is to consistently show up to work and be on time.”
Top centers take the time to further educate agents on attendance/adherence during orientation, illustrating to new-hires what happens to queues, service level, customer satisfaction and agent occupancy whenever even just a few agents are not seated and handling calls when they are supposed to be. Such in-depth education and illustration is critical, and very effective at fostering a strong sense of accountability and sense of purpose among staff, says Szabo.
“Some centers assume that agents can’t understand the ‘big picture,’ but if you start to share with them details on the cost of absenteeism and adherence, and the impact on customers, the company and peers, agents will grasp the ‘power of one’ principle — and it can be quite an eye opener for them. You need to show them — from a straight operational and math perspective — how important they are, otherwise it can be so easy for them to think ‘I’m just one person; what difference can I really make in a call center.’”
New-hire training is also the time to go over the center’s specific attendance policies and adherence objectives. Leading centers ensure that these policies and goals are fair and feasible; the best centers even involve more experienced agents in the process of creating the policies and objectives, thus practically ensuring fairness and buy-in from the rest of the staff.
They recognize and reward agents for consistently achieving/exceeding attendance and adherence objectives.
Education isn’t the only weapon required for batting absenteeism and adherence issues. Show me a center where agents are consistently present and accounted, and I’ll show you a center that makes a point to publically praise and reward staff who maintain stellar attendance and adherence records over time.
Top centers do this without breaking the bank, realizing that agents aren’t looking for bribes, rather appreciation and recognition. This can be as simple as announcing the names and accomplishments of deserving agents at meetings or luncheons, including their names on an attendance bulletin board, and/or rewarding them with plaques.
Some centers have gotten more creative in this regard, introducing fun incentives such as allowing agents who meet an attendance goal (or who adhere to schedule consistently) to spin a wheel or draw from a hat to win prizes, which might include an extra day off, an extra daily break for a week, or any number of other prizes. In other centers, agents who show up for work and effectively adhere to schedule over a certain period of time earn “funny money,” which they can redeem for small prizes such as movie tickets or gift certificates for stores or restaurants.
But centers should be careful not to over-motivate in their efforts to slash absenteeism, warns Szabo, as doing so can lead to a lesser-known though no less troublesome problem: “presenteeism.” Presenteeism refers to when agents who, in an effort to qualify for alluring prizes and rewards, come to work on days when they really should have stayed home due to illness or injury. This not only can result in poor performance and further hindering their health, it can also negatively impact the health and performance of the entire contact center, as contagious agents spread their germs from workstation to workstation.
Thus, while Szabo does recommend rewarding agents for good attendance and adherence, she does not recommend providing huge prizes for perfect attendance — the type of extrinsic rewards that might tempt agents to push themselves too hard. “The reward piece needs to be carefully managed,” she says, “and probably should entail shorter time periods and smaller rewards.”
They have an effective workforce management processes in place.
The best efforts to educate and motivate agents to help boost attendance and adherence will have little impact if the center’s forecasting and scheduling processes are subpar. If the actual call load consistently exceeds what the center predicted and staffed for, agents have to endure the deluge — as well as the frequent sentiments of frustration from callers when they finally escape from the long queue. To help recover from the barrage of calls and complaints, many agents (if they don’t quit) will take an extra day off here and there or extend their break or spend a few extra minutes in wrap-up mode.
Centers with the most success at keeping agents in seats are experts not only at accurately forecasting contact volume, but at other critical aspects of workforce management, as well. They understand that a big part of the art of staffing is effectively factoring in “shrinkage” — breaks, lunches, coaching, ongoing training and anything else that keeps scheduled agents off the phone — and adjusting schedules accordingly.
“Adherence to schedule is dependent on so many things, and one of them is how good a job the call center has done of accounting for shrinkage,” says Szabo. “This goes beyond adjusting for lunches, breaks and training; the center needs to think about — and make necessary improvements — regarding issues like agents having to get up and walk over to a fax machine, or wander around looking for a supervisor when they need help, or circling around the parking lot outside looking for a space. If you have accounted for all the things that keep agents away from the phone, then you should be able to see adherence to schedule around 90 percent or better; but if you haven’t accounted for all those things, there are going to be problems.”
They make scheduling more agent-centric.
Contact centers with the best attendance and adherence results are not only good at creating schedules, as just discussed; they are good at giving agents a chance to do the same.
Agent self-service and empowerment has emerged as a leading practice in workforce management today, with centers investing in tools that place the entire scheduling process online and enable staff to quickly and easily access schedules, request/negotiate vacations, bid for and swap shifts, and enter their preferences for things like days off and start times — all right from their desktop or home PC.
This is not to say that agents are being handed total control over their scheduling destinies, but they are certainly more involved than in the past. And since they now have much more of a say in their schedules, they are much more likely to adhere to them.
They don’t let their performance metrics push agents away.
One of the reasons why so many contact centers are perennially plagued with high absenteeism and poor adherence is that so many of them center their performance measurement strategy around straight productivity metrics — many of which are out of the direct control of agents.
When strict objectives for things like average handle time (AHT) and number of calls per shift or hour are enforced, the strain on agents can be intense; they want to provide good service and support to customers, but feel the pressure from above to rack up a high call count, which many agents will attempt to do by cutting calls short and failing to provide that “something special” that most callers crave. Needless to say, the strain of handling as many calls as possible coupled with the frequent complaints of dissatisfied customers is enough to make even the best agents want to stay home or hide in the break room.
That’s why top centers take great care to create a balanced blend of both productivity and quality measurements — placing the strongest emphasis on metrics that have the biggest impact on the customer experience and that don’t push agents to the brink of insanity (e.g., first-call resolution, call quality).
On the productivity side, these centers focus less on measurements like AHT and number of calls handled, and more on things agent can control, like adherence to schedule — realizing that if agents are in place and empowered to do what they were hired to do (provide excellent customer care), things like AHT and number of calls will generally take care of themselves.
They’ve have an agent wellness initiative in place.
Contact centers with the best attendance and adherence results place a heavy emphasis on agent health and well-being. Many have implemented formal wellness initiatives aimed at keeping illnesses and injuries to a minimum. In addition to ensuring that agents are physically able to show up and perform well at their job, wellness initiatives show staff that the company cares about them, thus fostering strong engagement and morale that helps to further enhance attendance and adherence to schedule.
Among contact centers that have achieved big results via wellness initiatives are Duke Energy, Wisconsin Power & Light, GE Capital Solutions, and Canadian credit union service provider CUETS. (See Wellness Initiatives Ignite Healthy Agent Performance and Retention.)
Typical wellness initiatives include such things as access to onsite fitness facilities (or discounted memberships at local gyms); free wellness courses and counseling (e.g., free smoking cessation programs, weight loss/nutritional counseling, stress management workshops, etc.); healthier food options in cafeterias and vending machines; free flu shots and health screening tests; ergonomics training as well as an emphasis on effective facility design (e.g., acoustics, lighting, spatial design, etc.).
Such initiatives have helped many centers cut not only agent absenteeism and attrition, but also overall healthcare costs. And, of course, healthier agents are happier agents, and, importantly, happier agents mean happier, more loyal customers.
They offer a work-at-home option.
What better way to get agents to show up for work than to have them wake up next to their workstation? Contact centers that take time to implement a solid home agent program say goodbye to much of the absenteeism and tardiness brought on by inclement weather, transportation issues and traffic problems. Not to mention the fact that offering a work-at-home option greatly expands your recruiting reach and helps to attract and retain the most skilled agents in the labor pool — agents who are dedicated to the customer care cause and who are likely to be in their seat when expected.
And while we already touched upon the importance of not pushing agents to work when they are quite ill, home agents are less likely than onsite staff to call in sick whenever they feeling a tad under the weather — and there is no risk of them spreading germs to coworkers since they work within the comfortable confines of their own home.
Home agent programs also add more flexibility to the center’s staffing model, which helps to take the burden of unexpected call spikes off of onsite staff. For instance, home agents can quickly log on to handle contacts when spikes occur, not only making it easier and less costly to manage fluctuations in call volume, but also reducing burnout – and resulting attendance and adherence issues among agents centerwide. Some centers schedule a percentage of home agents to be "on-call" to ensure that the center has extra staff available in case of unexpected call surges.
They empower agents to come up with solutions.
Few contact centers achieve stellar attendance and adherence to schedule results without actively seeking suggestions and input regarding these issues from agents themselves. Regularly asking staff for new ideas that will help make the job more enticing — and enlisting agents to help put plans into action — is one of the best ways to keep everybody engaged and committed to the contact center cause.
Lori Bocklund, president of call center consulting firm Strategic Contact, recommends using a third-party specialist to solicit such suggestions and feedback from agents, as doing so often puts staff more at ease and results in them being more frank and open about what contributes to attendance and adherence problems. “A focus group — preferably run by outsiders — may reveal some key things about what is causing absenteeism in the call center,” says Bocklund.
Some truly forward-thinking contact centers have implemented formal agent-directed task forces whose primary focus is on upping attendance and adherence. The benefits of such initiatives are invaluable, says Szabo.
“If you are struggling with absenteeism, adherence and/or attrition issues, I recommend creating your own, inhouse, agent-led “Attendance Team” with a mandate to measurably improve attendance and adherence while cutting attrition. I’m a firm believer that majority of challenges we face in call centers today can best be resolved by actively and continuously engaging our agents in uncovering both the root causes and the right solutions for those problems.”
Adherence to Schedule Defined
Adherence to schedule is a general term that refers to how well agents adhere to their schedules. Also known as real-time adherence. The measure is independent of whether the call center actually has the staff necessary to achieve a targeted service level and/or response time; it is simply a comparison of how closely agents adhere to schedules.
Adherence to schedule generally consists of all logged-on time, including the time spent waiting for transactions to arrive. More specifically, adherence consists of time spent in talk time, after-call work, waiting for calls to arrive, and placing necessary outbound calls. Adherence can also incorporate the issue of timing — when a person was available to take calls. This is sometimes called schedule compliance. The idea is to ensure that agents are logged on for the amount of time required, as well as when required.
The two terms most often associated with adherence include:
1. Availability: The amount of time agents were available.
2. Compliance: When they were available to take calls.
Data for adherence to schedule typically comes from the workforce management system and/or ACD reports.
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Other Ways to Up Attendance and Adherence
The practices cited in this article are some of the best ways to cut absenteeism and enhance adherence to schedule, but they are not the only ways. Here are a few other tactics to help ensure that your agents are in the right place at the right times:
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Offer “compressed” schedules (e.g., 4-day workweek, 10 hours each day) and other alternative/flexible scheduling options
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Offer a buy-back program for unused sick days.
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Add job diversity via intriguing tasks and projects.
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Create room for growth via dynamic skill paths and career development opportunities.
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Foster strong relationships between agents and their supervisor.
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Make the job fun with things like theme days, parties, creative contests, humor, etc.
