Contact Centers: How to Calculate Staff Levels and Scheduling Requirements

But if your call volume doubles, you don’t necessarily require twice the number of staff to meet your service goals. And when call volume increases eightfold, only about six times the number of staff is needed. As staff volume grows, the staff to workload ratio gets smaller and smaller.

The reason for these increased efficiencies and the lower staff-to-workload ratio is simply that with a higher volume of calls, there’s a greater likelihood that when an agent is finished with a call, there’ll be another call coming in right behind it for that person to handle. With a bigger volume, each person has the opportunity to process more calls each hour and spends less time in an available state waiting on a call to arrive. As a result, you don’t need as many staffers.