Exploring the Importance of Adherence in Workforce Management

The environment within the contact center is both exciting and intimidating at the same time. Contact center managers juggle a variety of elements to create an effective schedule of multiple agents with varying degrees of skill and experience. At the same time, they conduct complicated analytics to project volume and anticipate peaks and valleys to schedule according to need. This complicated dance is one easily streamlined with a proven workforce management solution.

Workforce management software provider, Monet Software, recently published a white paper (introduced in this blog) that examines the importance of the contact center schedule and how to keep your team of agents and your contact center as a whole adhering to your current schedule requirements. It’s essential that employees stick to their schedules to ensure optimal customer service, increased productivity and optimized efficiency.

The Monet Software white paper, Strategies for Improving Call Center Agent Adherence; The True Value of a WFM Solution, summarizes five strategies to help boost agent adherence in your contact center. Why take a hard look at adherence? If you don’t make it a priority for your entire team, any investment in workforce management software is wasted. When struggling with rising costs, lower revenues and frustrated customers, adherence is one thing you have the power to improve to drive measurable results.

Workforce management software can also be designed to help you implement schedule adherence strategies more effectively. These activities have a significant impact on the bottom line as they can effectively reduce costs and increase your overall productivity. In the long run, your profitability is optimized and a better overall environment results.

This white paper will explore workforce management strategies that help you identify why your contact center or agent team is out-of-adherence. Perhaps your agents don’t understand the importance of adhering to the schedule, or they simply don’t understand how to use the workforce management platform to manage their time effectively. You can easily educate your team while you implement methods to monitor and measure their adherence.

It’s also important to learn how to work with your team in an environment optimized through a robust workforce management platform. This investment is only as good as you put it to work for you. Work with your team so they understand how to use it, why it’s important and what adherence means to your organization as a whole.

Finally, you need to know how to establish a culture of adherence within your contact center as you rely on your workforce management platform. When you take the right approach, you equip your agents for schedule adherence and ultimately drive greater productivity and results.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco