Schedule Adherence in Workforce Optimization for Customer Service

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Schedule Adherence in Workforce Optimization for Customer Service

    Schedule adherence is a critical component for monitoring how well team members follow their assigned schedules within the Customer Service environment. It enhances operational efficiency and informs future staffing decisions. With the upcoming deprecation of Legacy Workforce Optimization in the Tokyo release, customers are encouraged to transition to the updated features.

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    Key Features

    • Clock-in and clock-out events track agent availability, generating adherence and conformance reports.
    • Adherence measures how closely agents follow their schedules, while conformance assesses total work time against scheduled time.
    • Managers can access team schedules, set adherence targets, and analyze historical attendance data.
    • Administrators can adjust threshold percentages and modify calculation formulas for adherence and conformance.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing schedule adherence, organizations can:

    • Optimize demand forecasting and staffing based on historical agent resource usage.
    • Identify coaching opportunities for agents to improve performance.
    • Monitor compliance with published schedules and enhance overall team productivity.

    Through effective management of schedule adherence, teams can achieve better alignment with performance expectations, leading to improved service delivery.

    You can use schedule adherence to monitor whether your team members are adhering and conforming to the schedules and to improve the operational efficiency of your organization.

    Important:
    Starting with the Tokyo release, Legacy Workforce Optimization is being prepared for future deprecation. It will be hidden and no longer activated on new instances but will continue to be supported. For details, see the Deprecation Process [KB0867184] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.

    Clock-in and clock-out events are generated as agents change their availability status. The time between the clock-in and clock out events are aggregated to create schedule adherence and conformance reports.

    Adherence measures how closely agents follow their schedule to complete their assigned work. Conformance measures the agents’ total time at work compared to the total scheduled time period, regardless of adherence.

    Schedule adherence helps your organization to do the following actions:
    • Measure whether the effort spent on demand forecasting and scheduling team members is used in an optimal manner.
    • Plan for more effective staffing needs in the future based on your insights into the historical use of agent resources.
    • Discover coaching opportunities for your agents when there are gaps in their adherence. For more information, see Coaching in Workforce Optimization for Customer Service.
    As a manager, you can do the following actions:
    • Access the schedule of all of your teams from one location and gain insights on whether your team is complying with published schedules.
    • Increase your team's performance by setting expected adherence targets.
    • View the time attendance of your agents by looking at such details as clock-in and clock-out times.
    • Analyze the historical time attendance of your team members.
    • View planned versus actual historical data for your team and individual agents.
    • Modify the clock-in and clock-out times of your agents.

    As an administrator, you can set the threshold percentages and change the formulas for calculating schedule adherence and conformance.

    Schedule Adherence for Customer Service in action

    Watch this short video to understand how managers and agents use Schedule Adherence in Workforce Optimization for Customer Service

    Consider the following steps to determine the schedule adherence and conformance:
    1. The administrator sets the Agent Time Work Event Trigger business rule as active to record the clock-in and clock-out times of customer service agents.
    2. An agent works for the Customer Service operations team and reports to a manager. Let's assume this scenario is a typical work day​:
      1. The agent logs in to CSM Agent Workspace​.
      2. The agent changes the presence status to Available and starts work. The clock-in event gets generated.
      3. The agent changes the presence status to Break and goes for lunch. The clock-out event gets generated.
      4. When the agent comes back from lunch and answers ​a phone call, the presence state becomes Busy and the clock-in event gets generated.
      5. The agent then logs out from CSM ​Agent Workspace or changes the presence status to Offline​. The clock-out event gets generated.
      6. At the end-of-the-day, the agent's time worked summary is generated with key performance indicators (KPIs), such as Start Time, End Time, Planned Work, Time Not Worked, Available Non Planned Time, Time Worked, and Adherence%, Conformance %​.
    3. The agent's manager logs in to Manager Workspace to view the agent's time worked in the Team Calendar. The manager can also view the agent's actual time worked and working pattern for all historical days. If required, the manager can coach the agent to a desired performance that fits in with the team culture.