5 tips for empowering agents through adherence

Operational leaders know that adherence is a key metric for keeping your support environment running smoothly — after all, even the best-laid plans can fall apart if they aren’t followed through. But let’s be real, adherence often gets a bad rap as a “big brother” 👁 metric or a tool for micromanagement.

It doesn’t have to be that way. By following a few smart best practices, you can strike the right balance between a positive agent experience and operational excellence. With this approach, discussing adherence with your team can shift from a source of stress to a path for success.

1. Be transparent

When implementing adherence as a metric, transparency is key to building a culture of mutual trust. Clear communication lays the groundwork for meaningful team conversations and helps prevent anyone from feeling blindsided when adherence comes up.

One way to foster this clarity is by directly sharing with agents which statuses will count toward adherence for each scheduled event. This ensures that everyone knows exactly what success looks like and gives both agents and managers a shared language for addressing any issues that arise.

Assembled makes it easy to empower your team with this level of transparency. Our platform allows you to customize the views available to each agent, ensuring they always have access to the information that matters most to them. As a best practice, consider giving agents access to their own adherence metrics through our Agent Scorecard, helping them stay informed and engaged.

2. Explain the bigger picture

When discussing adherence, it’s important to share the bigger picture — you’re not micromanaging, you’re *macro-*managing. Make it clear that adherence isn’t just about following a schedule; it’s about elevating the entire team’s performance. By sticking to their schedules, agents play a crucial role in driving top-line goals.

To bring this home, connect adherence to the things your team cares about:

• Lower workload: High adherence reduces occupancy, which means individual agents experience a lighter workload and are less likely to burn out.
• Better customer experience: When adherence is high, SLA improves, leading to faster response times and a greater likelihood of hitting team targets.
• Personal success: Solves per hour go up with high adherence, helping agents achieve their personal KPIs more easily.
• More flexibility: Consistent adherence leads to more predictable staffing, which could translate into more flexibility for the team, like easier approval for planned time off.

By framing adherence as a tool for achieving these positive outcomes, you can help your team see it as an enabler of success, not just a box to check.

3. Set realistic expectations

Your adherence goals should be clearly communicated and realistic for your team to achieve. For most agents, the biggest worry with adherence is the fear of losing the flexibility to be human during their workday — but let’s face it, people are not robots 🤖! It’s crucial to set standards that are attainable and to reinforce that perfection is not the goal.

In fact, your adherence target should not be 100% — that’s simply not realistic and can lead to unnecessary stress. For context, the average adherence rate on live channels for teams using Assembled is around 80%. When setting your goals, we recommend starting by assessing where your team currently stands and aiming for a goal that’s 5-10% above your current average.

By setting thoughtful, achievable goals, you can help your team focus on steady improvement without the pressure of unattainable perfection.

4. Coach in the moment

The best time to have adherence conversations is in the moment. Addressing issues as they arise gives agents more opportunity to course-correct and helps prevent any serious impacts on team-wide metrics. Regularly checking adherence trends throughout the day and quickly informing teammates if they’re off track can make a big difference.

Assembled makes this easy with our Realtime Dashboard. We streamline all of your agent activity across various platforms into a single source of truth, and our dashboard sends out the bat signal 🦇 when things aren’t going according to plan. Teams using our Realtime Dashboard typically see a 9% increase in live channel adherence — because coaching in the moment can turn the tide!

5. Celebrate high performers

The best thing about adherence as a metric is that, unlike almost every other key performance indicator, it’s entirely within the agent’s control and effort-based. Other core metrics — like CSAT, AHT, or Solves — often come with a bit of luck. You might be working during a slow period, dealing with a particularly complex issue, or chatting with a customer who’s having a tough day.

Adherence, on the other hand, is completely self-determined. As long as the target is realistic, it’s absolutely possible for agents to earn an A+ for effort! When your team hits the goal, make sure to celebrate their contributions. Whether it’s during regular performance reviews, in team meetings, or simply with a few kind words throughout the day, recognizing their success goes a long way.

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