Call Centre Occupancy is one of the key measures used to determine how efficient a call centre is running.
It’s normally expressed as a percentage and is the time a call centre agent spends on the phone talking to customers versus the total available time of their shift.
The actual calculation is:
(Total handling time) / (total logged in time) x 100 = Occupancy rate
For example, if on a regular shift a call centre agent works 6 hours and looking at the call statistics they were on the phone actually speaking to customers for 5 of those 6 hours, that would be an occupancy of 83.33%.
Why should you look at Call Centre Occupancy?
Call Centre Occupancy is often a good indicator to determine how well your resources are aligned to the workflow – too low an occupancy means call centre agents are spending long times between breaks waiting for calls, too high and it means call centre agents are getting very little, if any, breaks between calls.
The average target for call centre occupancy is normally around 80 – 85%.
Anything lower is not efficient and anything above 90% on a regular basis will lead to fatigue in your workforce.
Thankfully there is Workforce Optimisation software along with really smart dudes like Workforce Planners who job (and skill) is used to best align rosters to workflow and ensure your occupancy figure is just right đŸ™‚
Next steps
- Download our free Call Centre Calculator to model the impact call centre occupancy can have on your Service Levels.
- If you want to learn more about call centre metrics and KPI’s read The 10 Most Popular Call Centre Metrics and KPIs.
- Attend one of our courses for call centre team leaders and managers – visit CX Skills for upcoming courses.
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