What is schedule adherence? Complete guide to why it is important and how to improve it

Every contact center has to balance managing customer demands—especially during peak periods like weekends and promotional events. 

These events can lead to an overwhelming influx of customer queries and significantly disrupt your targets and schedules (in addition to creating additional stress for your agents and supervisors).

This is where schedule adherence matters.

By having a good schedule adherence strategy, you can empower your team to uphold service standards, reduce wait times, and still keep your customers happy.

At Dialpad, we’re in a bit of a unique position in that not only do we operate global contact center teams as part of Dialpad’s 24/7 customer support, we’re also building a call center platform that has some unique schedule adherence features. 

Keep reading to learn about the intricacies of schedule adherence, including how to calculate it and the best practices for ensuring optimal performance.

What is schedule adherence?

Schedule adherence is an efficiency metric that measures how closely your agents are following their schedules. Contact center adherence is crucial for assessing agent performance and ensuring that every member of your team is pulling their weight.

Importance of schedule adherence: Why it matters

Schedule adherence is important in a contact center because it’s a direct reflection of your agents’ punctuality, performance, and, ultimately, their responsibility and contributions within your team. The result of all this: a smoothly running operation that reliably hits KPIs and helps the business grow.

What factors affect schedule adherence?

It’s important to note, however, that deviations from the schedule aren’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, these instances highlight your team’s commitment to quality customer service. 

For example, when agents extend their calls past scheduled breaks to resolve customer issues, they’re prioritizing customer satisfaction over rigid scheduling. In this scenario, forcing the conversation to end too quickly just for the sake of adherence will make for a not-so-great customer experience. 

(Of course, consistently prolonged calls and poor adherence might indicate deeper issues that do need to be dealt with, like an overwhelming workload.)

Low adherence often doesn’t happen simply because agents are bad at their jobs. Sometimes, it might not be a reflection of agent performance at all. Common factors that can impact schedule adherence include:

• The accuracy of your forecasts

• How well trained and skilled your agents are

• Your ability to monitor performance in real time monitoring

• Whether you have incentives in place to encourage adherence

… Just to name a few.

How to Calculate Schedule Adherence (Formula + Examples)

Contact center adherence is calculated as a percentage: Divide an agent’s actual time where they’re available to handle calls by their total scheduled working time. Then, multiply this number by 100 to get a final adherence percentage. 

The schedule adherence formula is:

Schedule adherence = (actual time worked / total time scheduled) x 100

Example of schedule adherence:

Let’s look at an example. Say one of your agents has the following schedule, and they hit all of those scheduled activities for 100% adherence: 

This has them scheduled to work for 390 minutes total.

How to improve schedule adherence within your team

To improve schedule adherence amongst your agents, here are a few basic steps you can take:

1. Track performance in real time

By tracking metrics like agent status, you can see who’s switching between available and unavailable states during their scheduled shifts.

You can then monitor your call center analytics and address any issues to minimize disruptions and ensure your team remains consistently available to handle incoming calls.

When tracking your agents, here are a few ways to get the best results:

• Identify KPIs which align with your contact center’s objectives. These KPIs will serve as benchmarks for tracking agents and measuring their schedule adherence.

• Develop accurate forecasting models to schedule the right number of agents during peak and non-peak periods. This ensures you’ll always have enough staff to cover a workload, while minimizing resource waste due to overstaffing.

• Set up regular training and coaching sessions to help agents improve their skills and knowledge, enabling them to handle calls more efficiently.

Dialpad WFM provides a deeper unique approach to adherence with a unique metric, time-on-task, which combines adherence with productivity to help managers better understand agents’ work patterns in real-time.

2. Set clear targets 

As with any other productivity goal, you need to set targets—in this case, for what you expect your team’s adherence to be. 

Hitting 100% isn’t a realistic expectation—even the best contact centers in the world don’t achieve 100% adherence—so take into account different sources of interference like technical issues as well as comfort breaks. Typically, setting a goal of around 85 to 95% is not only realistic, but also ambitious enough to motivate a team to stay on track.

Your goal might also vary from channel to channel. Different request types may need more attention than others, and your target adherence scores should reflect this. (You don’t want agents to prioritize hitting an unrealistic adherence target above delivering quality customer service.)

3. Incentivize adherence

Establishing a reward system based on adherence performance is a great way to incentivize your agents to adhere to their schedules. 

This recognition can include bonuses, extra time off, or other incentives that motivate your agents to prioritize schedule adherence, while boosting morale and contributing to a positive work environment.

When developing a reward system, here’s a few things to keep in mind:

• Ensure that the rewards offered are directly tied to schedule adherence—the better the adherence, the bigger the reward. You might consider implementing a tiered structure where your agents can earn different levels of rewards based on their adherence performance.

• Include team-based rewards to encourage collaboration and peer support. Team rewards promote a sense of camaraderie and healthy competition among agents, further motivating them to adhere to schedules without cultivating a toxic environment.

• Conduct surveys or hold focus groups to gather feedback on rewards, challenges in adhering to schedules, and suggestions for improving the reward system.

4. Use workforce management software

Finally, a useful tool that helps with schedule adherence is a good workforce management (WFM) platform. Not only can this help with optimizing scheduling and adherence tracking, it can also automate tasks like forecasting call volumes, shift planning, and more. 

Dialpad WFM, for example, gives you real-time visibility into adherence to work schedule data, enabling you to make more informed decisions and adjustments to ensure optimal staffing levels and agent schedule adherence.

Beyond an intuitive, user-friendly interface, Dialpad WFM also comes with features like:

• Forecasting: Accurately forecast call and messaging volumes and plan staffing requirements based on historical data—no more guesswork or overstaffing.

• Reporting: Track and report agent metrics like performance, adherence, and shrinkage, to give you a clear view of your team’s operation.

• Scheduling: Simplify activity scheduling and delegation, allowing you to assign tasks and responsibilities to your agents easily, and generate schedules at the click of a button.

• Integrations: Seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack—Dialpad integrates with HRIS, payroll systems, calendaring apps, and more.

Time-zone management: Coordinate schedules more easily with Dialpad WFM’s comprehensive timezone management features.

Benefits of measuring schedule adherence

Agents who deviate from their schedules too much can put your customer service quality at risk, and fewer agents handling calls means longer waiting times for customers, which lowers customer satisfaction. 

Not only that, this also means that agents who are on call have to work harder than they should. They’ll be more stressed, which directly impacts customer interactions, CSAT scores, and more.

Besides reducing the risk of this happening, tracking adherence benefits contact centers in a few other ways:

1. Greater fairness

Tracking contact center schedule adherence promotes workplace fairness by ensuring consistent expectations and equal treatment among your agents. Here’s how it achieves that:

• By tracking adherence, you’re establishing clear and consistent standards across the board. Everyone is accountable for following their assigned schedules, regardless of their position or tenure.

• Adherence tracking creates transparency, making your agents aware that their scheduling adherence is being monitored.

• It becomes easier to identify imbalances or instances where certain agents may be consistently overloaded with work, while others have lighter schedules.

Monitoring adherence also helps supervisors make sure policies are applied uniformly, whether they’re about break times, time-off requests, or adherence to shift schedules. This avoids any perception of bias or unfairness in policy enforcement.

2. More effective scheduling

Adherence tracking also helps with forecasting accuracy. When it’s tracked alongside other related metrics and historical data, adherence can help inform staffing demands based on call volume patterns, peak hours, and busy periods.

Adherence tracking with a solution like Dialpad WFM also gives supervisors real-time visibility into agent availability and helps them monitor adherence rates throughout the day—and immediately adjust by reassigning breaks or staggering lunch periods when needed.

3. Improved productivity and efficiency

Adherence tracking helps your agents prioritize tasks based on scheduled activities. For example, agents can allocate their time more effectively by prioritizing call handling during peak periods, or taking part in training sessions during low periods. This ensures that essential tasks are completed on time, and helps raise overall efficiency.

Adherence data can also serve as a key performance metric for your agents and managers. By providing visibility into adherence rates, agents can understand their own performance and identify areas for improvement—and supervisors can provide more targeted coaching and training.

Schedule adherence vs. schedule conformance: What’s the difference?

Schedule adherence refers to how closely agents stick to their specific scheduled tasks and timings, including breaks and log-in times.

Schedule conformance, on the other hand, measures the total amount of work completed by an agent against the total scheduled work time, regardless of the exact times the work was done. 

In other words, adherence is more about the precision in following a schedule, while conformance is focused on overall productivity.

Improve schedule adherence with real-time monitoring from Dialpad

Scheduling adherence is a critical metric in almost all contact centers, and thanks to modern contact center and WFM platforms, managers no longer have to calculate or measure them manually.

Learn how Dialpad WFM’s schedule adherence features make it easier for supervisors to keep an eye on agent performance and time spent on task.