Conformance

December 18, 2018 Last Updated: February 1, 2021
Justin

Call centre conformance can best be described as the total amount of time an agent was scheduled to work versus the time they actually worked.

Conformance Versus Adherence

Conformance and Adherence can appear to be quite similar however there is a distinct difference.

Adherence measures how well the call centre worker was aligned to their schedule, whereas conformance measures the total time the agent worked compared to their schedule – in other words, it answers the question of did the contact centre agent work the amount of time they are getting paid to work for.

Still confused?

That’s OK I’m going to explain.

Firstly let’s look at adherence example.

 

An example of call centre adherence
An example of call centre adherence

In this example, the call centre employee was scheduled to work 60 minutes commencing at 9.00 am.

But they missed the bus and arrived late by 15 minutes for their scheduled start time.

So at 9.00 am when the WFM team expected them to be there, they weren’t.

Based on the adherence calculation, their adherence result would be 75% as they only worked 45 minutes of their rostered shift which was 9:00 to 10:00 (9:15 to 10:00).

But this employee felt really bad at arriving late and decided to work the extra 15 minutes at the end of their shift, finishing at 10.15 am.

So they were scheduled to work one hour, and they still worked one hour.

This is what Conformance measures – the total amount of time an agent was scheduled to work versus the time they actually worked.

How to Calculate Conformance

(working minutes) / (scheduled minutes) x 100 = conformance.

Using the example above:

(60 working minutes) / (60 scheduled minutes) x 100 = 100% conformance

 

 

So which one should you use?

As you can now tell (I hope),  both conformance and adherence are important metrics to use!

Scheduled adherence is critically important for your WFM team to ensure you can meet your Service Levels (using Erlang formulas).

If you have scheduled staff to be on the phones at a certain time, it’s important that is when they are logged (not earlier or later).

Of course, life happens.

Buses run late, calls run over break times etc.

But it’s also important that if you are paying agents to work for 8 hours a day, that they are working for 8 hours.

So conformance in a contact centre quite simply provides you with the data ensuring your contact centre agents are working their total rostered time.

Learn more:

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