Managing adherence is an age-old problem in the contact center. Here’s an updated take on a previous blog post to help you improve adherence and keep your operations running smoothly.
When agents don’t (or can’t) adhere to their schedule, the workforce management (WFM) team must manage these exceptions manually. Some companies tolerate a certain percentage of non-compliance as a cost of doing business, while other companies rely on supervisors to coach agents on the importance of adherence. Today, you can leverage automation to improve adherence, drive compliance and positively impact the bottom line.
With real-time automation in their hands, workforce management and contact center operations professionals can tackle their top challenges, like adherence, and turn them into opportunities.
Here are three examples of how you can improve adherence through contact center automation:
- Use a “Break Assistant”: Do long calls prevent agents from starting their breaks or lunches on time? With automation, you can set up business rules to automatically identify agents who are scheduled to go to break or lunch within the next 2-5 minutes (configurable). Then, to prevent these agents from receiving a call that might run into their lunch or break, prompt agents to start their lunch or break early. Using automation, a major telecom company was able to better manage adherence and save $7M annually.
- Prevent ACW Hide Out Sessions: Some agents (names not to be mentioned) take the matter of breaks into their own hands and hide out in after call work (ACW). This can significantly increase average handle time (AHT) and impact the customer experience. With contact center automation, you can have rules to monitor when ACW passes a threshold and send an automated message to agents asking them if they need help. With contact center automation, another top telecom company was able to shave 4 seconds from AHT.
- Improve Exception Handling for Greater Efficiency: Even the best agents occasionally get stuck in traffic or have a flat tire – these things happen. And, while it creates extra work for the WFM team, it’s just part of life. With automation, you can plan adherence exceptions for these scenarios, automatically update the WFM schedule and notify supervisors to improve the efficiency of their team.
What adherence challenges would you like to automate for your center? Check out these resources for inspiration and to learn more about contact center automation.