Balancing Occupancy with Service
Agent occupancy is a common measure in call centres. It looks at the actual time an agent is busy on customer contacts compared to the time the agent is available or idle.
It is calculated by dividing workload hours by staff hours.
Occupancy is an important measure of how well the call centre has scheduled its staff and how efficiently it is using its resources. If occupancy is too low, agents are sitting around idle with not enough to do. If occupancy is too high, the personnel may be overworked.
Where a call centre manager is working to improve the occupancy rate, there are a number of important factors to consider.
Obviously, the higher the service level that you are achieving, the lower the occupancy level will be. This balance exists because there is an inverse relationship between the two. Therefore, if your service level achievement is lower, occupancy will be higher – the lower the service level, the more calls you will have in queue and the higher the likelihood that an agent will receive call after call after call because queues exist.
Experienced call centre managers are acutely aware that the performance of a centre should, without exception, be based on the achievement of a service level that meets your customer expectations as opposed to increasing occupancy levels.
Generally, occupancy levels will be lower in a small call centre than in a large centre. There is little you can do about this, except look for opportunities to multi-skill, and pool staff in order to gain the efficiency benefits, which come predominantly from the higher occupancy levels found in large centres.
Many long time call centre managers and commentators would say that the optimal level of occupancy is around 85%. This figure provides a fast, challenging pace of work without allowing boredom to set in. It does not push the agents so much that they become burnt out.
Occupancy is a useful measure, of course, but the importance of it needs to be kept in perspective.
By its very nature, an inbound call centre cannot control it's flow of work. Customers call when they decide to do so - when they get the chance, or think of it, or when it is convenient. When they dial a call centre’s number, they do not know or care how many other customers are doing the same thing at the same time. Customers do not arrange among themselves when each will call, in order to efficiently space their calls for the ease of management and staffing in the call centre.
The impact that this has on a call centre is obvious - there will be busy periods and slow periods, sometimes within minutes of each other. Rather like at a suburban store in a shopping mall.
Calls may clump up at times and at other times there may be dry spells. The trick in call centre staffing is to cover all of these periods as well as possible, without grossly overstaffing. That is why service levels are so widely used as a measurement of a call centre’s performance.
You will probably never see a call centre with a target service level of 100% in ANY seconds: because it is the nature of the business that there are peaks and valleys in workload, and it is not always possible (or even reasonable) to staff for the highest peaks.
As call centres become more complex, the importance of "having the right staff and supporting resources in the right places at the right times" becomes ever more crucial to success.
However, the big picture balancing act for a top call centre manager normally involves being able to:
- Plan and manage call centre resources
- Handle a growing variety of customer contacts
- Effectively use reports and measurements
- Establish and meet performance objectives
- Win top management's support.
When you look at the importance of all of these, the relative importance of occupancy is placed in perspective.
