Contact Centers: How to Calculate Staff Levels and Scheduling Requirements

The measure of how busy agents are is called “agent occupancy.” It’s the percentage of logged-in time that an agent actually is busy in talk or wrap-up time. It’s calculated by dividing the amount of workload by the staff hours in place. Say you have 12 staffers handling 8.3 hours of workload. At one staff hour per agent, agent occupancy is just 69 percent. If your call volume is doubled and you have 21 staffers in place, twice the workload is being handled without doubling the workforce, so each person is busier. In this case, occupancy increases to 79 percent.