INTEGRATED TIME CLOCK AND PAYROLL APPLICATION

You’ve undoubtedly seen this behavior from agents: they arrive for work at 8:00 am and immediately log in to the company’s time and attendance system so they appear to be on time. Then, the agents hike down to the café to grab breakfast and return to their desks to visit all their friends, finally arriving about 10 minutes later than when they had logged in. Their time card says 8:00 am, not 8:10 am. What’s the big deal? It’s only 10 minutes – until you do the math.

Let’s do the math!

Assumption:
Contact center managers agree that 10 minutes per agent daily can easily be lost. This can happen at the start of a shift, when an agent returns from a break late, when an agent leaves early for lunch, or at the end of the day.

Example:
100 full-time agents, five work days, 50 weeks per year, $13.00 per hour

Calculation:
Cost per Minute =.22/minute ($13.00/60 minutes = .22)
Cost per Agent =.22/minute multiplied by 10 minutes = $2.20/agent
Cost per Day = 10 minutes multiplied by 100 agents = 1,000 minutes multiplied by $2.20/agent=$2,200/day
Cost per Week =$2,200/day multiplied by 5 working days = $11,000/week
Cost per Year = $11,000/week multiplied by 50 weeks is $550,000/year. That’s $550,000 a year spent on paying agents to eat donuts and socialize!

When you look at those staggering numbers, how can you brush off those 10 minutes any longer? What else can a company do with that money?

Yes, the contact center platform should integrate time and attendance systems.

Syncing up the time clock and the contact center platform eliminates the gap, providing the time clock is also integrated with the payroll system. The technology forces contact center agents to be available when they log in. With one single sign on, the agent is automatically logged into the contact center platform simultaneously with their timekeeping system. This puts agents into “ready” status; ready to take calls. If the agent changes his status, his supervisor will see the status change within the real-time dashboard in the contact center platform. The supervisor will also see the daily trends in the reports and can provide actual data to address the agent’s behavior. Take the excuses away from the agent and make it easy for the supervisor to track by integrating time and attendance with the contact center platform.

How APIs work: The contact center platform sends an API (application programming interface) every time an agent logs in or out, updating the time clock.

It notes the time electronically to the time clock. This process is transparent to the user, as it happens in the background. This API technology makes it super easy to integrate the time clock into the contact center platform, creating one login for the agent and eliminating payroll shrinkage. It will force your agents to change their behavior; they will arrive earlier to get their coffee and donuts on their own time, not during company time.

With API technology, there is no longer a reason to avoid payroll shrinkage. By integrating time and attendance with the contact center platform, the cost of eating donuts on company time disappears. Turn “donuts time” into productivity time!

Complete integration of the time clock, contact center platform and workforce management application will give your ROI the most significant boost yet. Companies rely too much on floor supervisors to review and reconcile time and attendance to match WFM. This manual process creates inconsistent results due to human error. Supervisors use different methodologies, speed through the task without caring too much, or aren’t sure how to get the data to match, which ends with inconsistent results. Managers who use this data realize it doesn’t make sense and begin questioning its integrity. Managers learn to distrust the reported data and don’t use it for key decision-making. When the time clock, contact center platform, and workforce management fully integrate, you eliminate manual reconciliation and create consistent metrics. Good consistent data is what drives the contact center.

How many contact centers rely on the agent to “fill in” their time card is impressive.

Agents will mark it “8:00 AM” even if they showed up at 8:03 – again the same argument – those 3 minutes, multiplied by the number of agents, times every day they manipulate their time card, adds up. Agents have been known to log into the payroll system from their smartphones while in the contact center parking lot, “marking” them on time. Yet they are not even in the building. If you still trust your agents, think again about what else you can do with that money. Integrating the time clock into the contact center platform will save you a lot of money, change agent behavior for the better, and control your contact center.