Determining the Right Number of Agents for the Call Center

One of the trickiest decisions a call center manager is expected to make is the right size of the staff. Too many agents, and you risk overstaffing and all its associated downsides (extra costs, bored agents, high turnover). Too few agents, and you’re asking for burned out workers, customer complaints, missed metrics and (once again) high turnover.

Right-sizing the call center staff isn’t easy, even when you practice some form of workforce management. If you’re still doing workforce management manually, it’s important you master the processes needed to at least get a ballpark of the right number of agents on the phone. Following is a primer for the process.  

Understand your historical traffic patterns. If you can’t track – down to the very last call – how many calls and other contacts are coming into the contact center at any given time of day, you’ll need to do that. Right-size staffing is hard enough, even when you KNOW how much work is coming in. Ensure that you’re getting up-to-date reports from the automatic call distributor or, failing that, call detail reports from your telecom provider about traffic and trends.

Break the numbers into half-hour increments. Calls and other contacts come in waves, so once you have the raw call data, you’ll need to break the numbers out into half-hour (or even 15-minute) intervals throughout the day before you can begin to build accurate schedules. Most ACDs have a call detail record function that will let you do this relatively easily.

Determine your average handle time. AHT is one of the most commonly tracked metrics. While it’s not great for measuring quality, it’s good for measuring quantity. In general, AHT = call duration + average after-call wrap-up time. You may already know this information. If not, you’ll need to figure it out from your call detail records. Be sure you’re using your real information and not some industry average, as different businesses will have vastly different AHTs.

Determine your desired service levels. In general, most companies aim to answer 80 percent of calls within 20 seconds. This is a good rule to follow. Any lower, and you’ll start seeing a rise in customer complaints. Many contact centers are beginning to aim higher.

Determine your occupancy. This number is the amount of time agents spend on the phone over the course of 30 minutes. Obviously, it’s not possible that agents will be able to spend all their time on the phone. Maximum occupancy is generally around 85 percent across all contact centers.

Once you have all these numbers, find a good Erlang calculator and plug them in. While it’s always good to have this method down pat – every call center manager should know it – modern workforce management solutions like those offered by Monet Software can eliminate many of these steps by making the calculations for you.

Edited by Maurice Nagle