How to Realize the True Value of Workforce Management

Providing exceptional customer service is paramount in today’s competitive business environment. Satisfied customers are loyal customers. Frustrated customers take their business elsewhere.

But call centers are tasked with more than just providing superior customer service. They must control costs and increase revenues as well. In call centers, where time is literally measured down to the last second, a minute here and a minute there can mean thousands of dollars are needlessly wasted each and every month.

Call center managers not only need to keep track of agent schedules, they also must ensure that their time is being used productively to answer calls. Without a strategic approach to manage agents and maximize their time, call centers are setting themselves up to waste valuable time and expensive resources that cause damage in the long run. When every minute counts, call centers must focus on the impact agent adherence has on revenues, costs, and service levels.

Adherence: Are You In or Out of It?

One of the biggest challenges of running a call center is making sure that employees stick to their schedules. Simply defined, adherence is the degree (measured in percent) to which an agent sticks to his or her schedule. Out-of-adherence causes either overstaffing (more agents are scheduled to compensate for lost agent time) or understaffing (no additional agents are staffed to compensate for the lost agent time). Overstaffing results in soaring operational costs, and understaffing impacts revenues and service quality, both impacting the bottom line.

Running and maintaining a call center requires efficient staffing and cost management strategies. Being unable to effectively manage agent time leads to fewer orders and increases costs for every agent who is out-of-adherence. For instance, a 25 agent center can save over $30,000 per year just by improving staffing by 2% and reducing shrinkage by 15 minutes per agent per day.

Let's take a closer look at the costs of agents being out-of-adherence. Consider this example:

A call center has 300 employees, each of whom works 5 days a week
The call center pays each agent 20 dollars/hour
The loss of time due to out-of-adherence activities equals 10 minutes per day per agent

The total loss of time will amount to: 10 minutes X 5 days X 52 weeks = 2,600 minutes or 43.3 hours each year per agent. That’s more than one week of work lost to one agent being out-ofadherence!

When we calculate the amount in dollars, it becomes: 43.3 hours X 20 dollars = $866 per employee. Therefore, 300 employees X $866 = $259,800 lost each year. This is an astonishing amount of loss for an average size call center, and can be the difference between a company surviving or thriving. And this only considers the cost impact. Think about the potential loss of revenues through periodic understaffing caused by “missing” agents (no agents, no orders).

Many call center managers make the mistake of thinking that an occasional 10-minute delay will not matter but, as illustrated above, it can cost the company a large amount of money in the long run. A short delay will affect productivity in a huge way. Whether the call center has 1,000 agents or 10 agents, losing 20 hours per agent decreases productivity, reduces revenue, skyrockets costs, and impacts the quality of service call centers must provide to keep customers happy.