Adherence

What is adherence?

Adherence is the time an advisor is true to their schedule, so when they are scheduled to take their breaks, lunch or any other shrinkage exceptions and if they take it at the correct time they are adhering. There are two types of adherence positive and negative.

Positive Adherence

Adherence is classed as positive when an advisor is online either waiting for a contact or dealing with a contact and not offline taking for example a break. Some centres do not measure this adherence as it is in the centres favour if the advisor is working instead of being on a break, thing is it might be in their favour but there will be negative adherence to counter this unless they miss the exception completely or they are logged in after their shift has finished. I believe this should be measured as if an advisor is late taking their lunch then when we have them scheduled after the lunch they will still be on lunch and not available and we would have planned for them to be there to handle our incoming contact demand.

Negative Adherence

This is when the advisor is not online available to take a contact or dealing with a contact. For example if the advisor is scheduled to be online but is taking a break. This could have an impact on your service centre as you plan how many agents you will have logged in throughout the day to best meet your call demand. Also a common behaviour in a contact centre especially a smaller centre is if the whole team don’t have the same break time, which is really a luxury a small centre cannot afford, they stay online that extra little bit so they can have their break with a friend.

Adherence Targets

In my time in call centres I have seen a range of targets from around 85% to 95% now to put this into perspective, 5% of non-adherence in a week for a full time advisor (40 hours) is 2 hours, That is 24 minutes per day which really should be achievable quite easily (well I think so). This however becomes a little harder if you measure both positive and negative as non-adherence.

Understanding adherence can help improve scheduling and planning roles as you are never going to achieve 100% so plan for 90% and if you achieve 95% then that’s a bonus. Focus on adherence can also improve your centre and if you can make the centre as a whole achieve greater than 95% you could save 1 FTE for every 20 advisors in your centre.