Nearly 60 years ago meteorologist Edward Lorenz suggested, “A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.”
While this statement is often interpreted to mean that small things can have a big impact, Lorenz’s insight was far more profound: In complex systems, small changes in one variable are guaranteed to effect change, and it is incredibly difficult to predict how impactful that change will be.
The fallacy of a ‘perfect’ contact center
In the highly complex contact center system, forecast accuracy has long been hailed as the golden ticket to cost controls. In theory, a “perfect” forecast would render a perfectly executed service level agreement (SLA), satisfied agents, and happy customers.
Unfortunately, human nature tends to muck up this perfect theory.
Despite continuous efforts to improve accuracy through cutting edge solutions like the AI-based forecasting offered in the NICE Workforce Management (WFM) suite, humans are unpredictable and customer needs are increasingly variable. Small deviations have the potential to significantly impact key performance indictors (KPIs), like the number of calls handled, talk time, and response time. If your contact center solution relies on standardized perfection—either from your forecasts or your very human customers and agents—you risk a highly unpredictable “butterfly effect” of poor customer experiences and agent burnout.
The negative butterfly effect of perfect
Burnout and attrition are a pervasive problem in the call center industry, and it’s not hard to understand why. Agents are positioned on the front line to professionally manage frustrated customers and unique challenges all while meeting strict quotas and rigid KPIs.
And often agents experience those quotas and KPIs as working in opposition to serving the customer: If an agent is a few minutes late starting their scheduled break because they stayed on a call helping a customer, they could find themselves out of adherence (and short on a break).
In cases like this, the butterfly effect is immediately apparent. If the contact center manages intraday deviances manually it could penalize the agent for an adherence violation. This situation is not only demoralizing for the agent—after all, is there anything more unfair than being punished for doing the right thing? —but also a burden on their supervisor, who must investigate the incident, ask the workforce management team to grant an exception, and remove the penalty.
Moreover, while the supervisor is busy handling this schedule deviation, they are not available to manage the other intraday changes that are piling up when they should focus on serving their customers.
Operationalized adaptability trumps perfection
Today’s successful contact centers have workforce management solutions that provide flexible event start times to encourage agents to offer outstanding service while maintaining system-wide control. Rather than punishing an agent for starting their break a few minutes late to stay on a customer call, contact centers are operationalizing flexible, adaptable ways of working.
This approach not only improves customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), but it also boosts agent well-being and reduces burnout. How? Purpose and autonomy fuel agent satisfaction and fosters a higher-quality work experience. New research from Gallup reveals that how employees experience their workload has a stronger influence on burnout than the number of hours they work. Plus, when it comes to overall well-being, the quality of the work experience has 2.5 to three times the positive impact than the number of days or hours worked.
With this in mind, NICE Employee Engagement Manager (EEM) offers a feature to help leaders operationalize flexibility and adaptability to prevent the negative butterfly effect of a one-size-fits-all framework: Adaptive Events.
How to automatically accommodate adaptive events
In contact centers, adaptive events include activities that are typically not customer-facing, such as lunches and breaks. Scheduling for these events should be flexible so that agents can prioritize the customer experience. However, contact centers often lock these events to fixed intervals in agent schedules. If the contact center handles adherence deviation manually it can force agents to choose between two conflicting priorities: schedule adherence or customer experience.
NICE EEM, an optional module for the NICE WFM suite, helps blend these critical priorities by bringing additional automation and intelligence to the intraday management process. Contact center leaders can use the Adaptive Events feature for any activity, not just breaks and lunches, to ensure that agents and supervisors are focused on serving customers rather than balancing adherence to schedules and CSAT.
With NICE EEM, contact center leaders can create adaptive event rules for agents to help with adherence. If an agent finishes their task before the event is scheduled to begin, NICE EEM prompts them to start the activity immediately. Once the agent starts the activity, NICE EEM automatically adjusts the schedule for the new timing while maintaining the event duration.
Similarly, if the task goes beyond the time the activity is scheduled to begin, NICE EEM considers that and automatically adjusts the timing for the activity to start when the agent changes states and again maintains the event duration.
Contact center leaders can define how adaptive the event should by defining how far the event start time can be moved in either direction, with values starting at 5 minutes and maxing out at 15 minutes.
Adaptability in action
For example, if an agent has a break scheduled for 12 p.m. and the threshold value is 5 minutes, at 11:55 a.m. NICE EEM alerts the agent of the upcoming break with four possible outcomes:
- Break at scheduled time
If the stars align and the agent ends the customer contact at precisely the scheduled time, no change takes place. - Break before the scheduled time (up to the defined threshold value)
If the agent starts the break any time after receiving the alert (in the above example between 11:55 a.m. and 12 p.m.), NICE EEM automatically adjusts the start and end times of the break while also maintaining the break duration. - Break after the scheduled time (up to the defined threshold value)
In case the task at hand goes beyond 12 p.m. and ends before 12:05 p.m. (threshold time), the agent can still start the break immediately and NICE EEM adjusts all subsequent timings. - Break after the threshold value
If the agent's current activity extends beyond the threshold time (beyond 12:05 p.m. in the example), the agent needs to notify the supervisor. The supervisor then manually adjusts the time.
Harness the butterfly effect with NICE EEM
NICE EEM encourages agents to focus on providing better customer service rather than keeping one eye on the clock to avoid adherence violations. By enabling contact centers to automatically adjust breaks or other activities based on business rules, agents aren’t penalized for handling long calls, management teams no longer need to interrupt their day to resolve adherence issues, and most importantly, the customer experience is improved.
While these individual actions may seem small, contact centers will benefit in the long and short term by harnessing the butterfly effect of improved service, agent well-being, and management capacity.
Learn more about how NICE EEM’s Adaptive Events automation capabilities are enabling contact centers across industries to focus on exceptional customer service while reducing the time spent manually handling adherence exceptions.