The performance of a contact centre depends on how well agents follow their scheduled activities. When agents are in adherence the contact centre's service level goals can be met, which increases customer satisfaction, and both shrinkage and staffing costs reduce. The IEX TotalView system's real-time and historical adherence features enable supervisors to easily monitor and analyse agent activity, based on comparison between an agent's scheduled and actual activity, as determined from login and logout codes from ACDs email servers and other contact routing systems.

Real-Time Adherence compares an agent's scheduled activity to current activity, using a real-time data stream from the ACD that provides current agent state information. Supervisors can use the real-time adherence feature to ensure that agents are following their schedules throughout the day. When a schedule deviation occurs, the agent's name is highlighted to alert the supervisor so that action can be taken to correct the situation, if necessary. Supervisors can also print the current Real-Time Adherence screen so that issues can be documented or addressed in coaching sessions as needed.

The Real-Time Adherence screen combines the display of agent adherence to schedules, agent adherence to work state time limits and an overall summary of agents in each state into one intuitive screen to provide supervisors an at-a-glance indication of agent performance. By monitoring agent schedule and state adherence, supervisors and managers can quickly identify agents that need help or coaching, and detect when agents are manipulating their availability to avoid receiving new contacts. The Real-Time Adherence screen also reveals which agents are late or fail to appear for their scheduled shift.

The Real-Time Adherence screen includes powerful features to monitor and manage adherence from one screen:

• Each agent's supervisor is identified on screen so managers or adherence specialists can quickly contact the supervisor when needed.
• Double-clicking on an agent instantly displays that agent's schedule for easy comparison or modification.
• User defined colours and thresholds for adherence allow supervisors to set their own adherence tolerances and state displays.
• Agents are automatically sorted in real-time by multiple user-defined criteria, including time out of adherence, state, scheduled activity, agent name and others, so that the most critical adherence issues can be displayed first.
• Agents that need extra monitoring can also be tagged with "push-pins" to keep them at the top of the list, independent of other sorting criteria.
• In multisite configurations, customisable permission settings allow adherence to be viewed for any individual site, or the entire contact centre from any workstation.

The IEX TotalView Historical Adherence feature provides comprehensive agent adherence reports for past days, comparing scheduled activity to actual activity as reported by ACDs and other contact routing systems. With Historical Adherence, supervisors and managers can quickly view and document how well individual agents and groups of agents follow their schedules. When agents deviate from their schedule, schedule efficiencies and service level goals based on planned staffing may be compromised.

Historical Adherence reports print scheduled agent activities alongside actual agent activities, allowing a quick analysis of adherence to be made for each agent. The report includes a description of schedule variances that indicate whether an activity started late, ended early or was unscheduled. Adherence reports also include a summary of scheduled time, available time and times and percentages in adherence. In addition to reporting an individual agent's adherence for individual days, Historical Adherence can summarise data for groups of agents and ranges of days, which can help supervisors track agent performance over time and help managers track how successful supervisors are at keeping their teams motivated.

Reports can be generated for only the agents whose deviation, in a given activity, exceeded a specified threshold value to allow supervisors to document or review performance of the agents who are most in need of management attention. Since the activity data is actually stored precisely as reported by the ACD, thresholds may be adjusted so that different report generations use different variance values.