Call Center Resources

The Math of Call Center Staffing

Calculating Resource Requirements and Understanding Staff and Service

Tradeoffs
Sharpen your pencils. Dust off the calculator. Its time for a math lesson.
Running a successful call center operation means managing by the numbers. And
the most important number of all is the number of bodies in seats each hour to
respond to customer contacts. Since over two-thirds of call center operating costs
are related to personnel, getting the just right number of staff in place is critical
in terms of both service and cost. This article outlines the step-by-step process to
calculate call center resource requirements and evaluate the most important
service and cost tradeoffs.
Calculating Workload
In the previous article on Forecasting Fundamentals, we explained the process of
forecasting calls taking historical data and analyzing trends and seasonal
patterns to arrive at monthly estimates, then using day-of-week and time-of-day
patterns to break down the numbers into hourly or half-hourly forecasts.
With these call volume forecasts and some assumptions about average handle
time (AHT), were ready to perform a simple calculation to arrive at staff workload.
Its simply the number of forecast calls for an hour multiplied by the average
handle time of a call. The average handle time (AHT) is made up of two
components: actual conversation or talk time plus any after call wrap-up time
associated with the call. The wrap up time can include almost anything filling
out a form, updating the customer database, etc.
This handle time will likely vary by time of day as well as by day of week. For
example, you may find that AHT is higher during the evening shift since you may
have newer staff working the undesirable hours, or simply have callers that like to
talk a little longer during the wee hours of the morning! Most call centers simply
use an average number for handle time across the board, which may be a
dangerous assumption if theres significant variance. Imprecise numbers can
contribute to the understaffing or overstaffing, so its best to use numbers that
actually reflect time-of-day or day-of-week patterns.
The workload number is then used to determine how many base staff are needed
to handle the calls. The part that makes staffing for a call center different than
any other kind of staffing situation is that this workload doesnt represent typical
work patterns. Lets compare an incoming call center to a group of clerical
workers processing mail in the same company. Between 8:00 and 9:00am, the

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clerical staff has 400 pieces of mail to process and each piece takes 3 minutes to
handle. Thats 1200 minutes or 20 hours of workload. How many people need to
be working to accomplish all the work by 9:00?
Ok, this isnt the tough math part yet. To process 20 hours of workload, 20 staff
would be needed. The reason for the 1:1 ratio is that the mail tasks represent
sequential workload. In other words, the staff can process the work as back-toback tasks and each person can accomplish one hour of work in an hour
timeframe.
Determining Call Center Staff Requirements
Now its time to staff for the call center. These employees are getting 400 calls
and each one takes an average of three minutes to handle 2 minutes of
conversation and another minute of after-call work. Again, we have 1200 minutes
or 20 hours of workload. How many people are needed?
Unfortunately, we cant handle the calls with only 20 people. At 8:05, there may
be 22 calls arriving, meaning all 20 agents are busy, with another 2 calls in queue.
Then at 8:15, there may only be 16 calls in progress, meaning 4 of our staff are
idle. Those 4 people wont be able to accomplish a full hours work, simply
because of the way the calls have arrived. In an incoming call center, the work
doesnt arrive in a back-to-back fashion. Rather, the work arrives whenever our
customers decide to place calls. So we have random workload instead of
sequential work. This brings us to the first math rule of call center staffing: You

must have more staff hours in place than hours of actual work to do.

So how many extra do we need? For 20 hours of workload, will we need 21 staff?
24? 30? The number of staff needed depends on the level of service we wish to
deliver. Obviously, the more staff we have, the shorter the delay. The fewer the
staff, the longer the caller will wait.
Determining what happens with a given number of resources in place to
accomplish a defined amount of workload requires a mathematical model that
replicates the situation at hand. There are several telephone traffic engineering
models available and one of these in particular is well-suited to the world of
incoming call centers. We use a model called Erlang C that takes into account the
randomness of the arriving workload as well as the queuing behavior (holding for
the first available rep) of the calls.
An Example of Erlang C
Lets take a look at Erlang C predictions based on the 20 hours of workload we
defined earlier. The table below shows what would happen with anywhere from
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21 to 28 staff (Column 1) in place to handle the 20 hours of incoming call
workload.
Number of
Staff

Delayed
Portion

21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28

76 %
57%
42%
30%
21%
14%
9%
6%

Delay of
Delayed
Callers
180 sec
90 sec
60 sec
45 sec
36 sec
30 sec
26 sec
23 sec

Average
Delay (ASA)

Service Level
(in 20 sec)

137 sec
51 sec
25 sec
13 sec
8 sec
4 sec
2 sec
1 sec

32%
55%
70%
81%
88%
93%
96%
97%

Lets take a look at each of the columns and measures of service. The second
column shows the portion of calls that would find no agent available and go into
queue and the third column shows how long those delayed callers would wait on
average. So, with 24 staff in place, the Erlang C model predicts that 30% of
callers would be delayed and that they would wait an average of 45 seconds in
queue.
The third column represents the average delay of all calls, including the ones
that are answered immediately. So, with 24 staff in place, 30 % of calls would
go to the queue and wait there 45 seconds, while the other 70% would be
answered immediately. The average delay, or average speed of answer (ASA) is
the weighted average of both these groups [ (45 x .30) + (0 x .70)] = 13
seconds. Its important to understand that this ASA number is not the average
queue experience for the callers. Either they wait (and do so for an average of
45 seconds), or they dont wait at all. The ASA isnt a real life number its a
statistic to represent the average of the two other numbers.
The fourth column represents service level. Service level represents X% of
callers that are handled in a specified Y seconds of delay time. This table shows
the percentage that are handled within a specified 20 seconds of wait time. A
common call center service goal is 80% of the calls handled in 20 seconds or
less. To meet this goal, wed need 24 staff in place, yielding a service level of
81% in 20 seconds.
Staffing to Service Goals

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So what should your service goal be? While there are some common goals seen
often in call centers, theres really no such thing as an industry standard for
what a service goal should be. Setting a speed of answer goal depends upon
many different factors. Call centers need to consider enterprise goals and
marketing strategies, competitor standards, and most importantly the
expectations of customers. We often find that call center management marches
toward the same service goal year after year without ever considering if the goal
should be higher or lower based on the business environment or customer
demands.
Customer expectations have certainly risen when it comes to speed of answer
expectations. More and more callers are basing their expectations and judging
your service on their last, best service experience. Taking a look at your call
centers ACD reports and looking at when callers begin to abandon calls will give
you some idea about a worst case delay scenario. But setting the best case
goal should involve getting feedback from senior management, customers,
competitors, and other centers and then evaluating cost and service trade-offs
to determine the impact on cost and on service of raising or lowering the goal.
Relationship of Staffing and Service
Lets take one more look at our staffing table and review the impact on service
as staff numbers change. Obviously, delay times increase as agents are
subtracted, and service improves as staff are added. But service is not affected
to the same degree each way, and this is a terribly important phenomenon to
understand about call center staffing.
Lets say weve decided we need to have 24 staff in place to handle the 20 hours
of telephone workload in order to meet an 80% in 20 seconds service level goal.
If we adjust the staff numbers up or down, there are two very different impacts.
First, if we add a person or two, the average speed of answer (ASA) improves
from 13 seconds to 8 seconds with 25 staff, and then to 4 seconds with 26 staff.
The first person added yielded a 5-second improvement, with the next person
gaining us only a 4-second improvement, and a third person would result in an
ASA of 2 seconds, a 2-second improvement. Adding staff results in diminishing
returns, with less and less impact as the staff numbers get higher.
Now lets look at the effect of subtracting staff from our 24 person requirement.
When we subtract one, two, and three persons our ASA increases to 25 seconds,
51 seconds, and 137 seconds respectively. The first person out resulted in an
increase of 12 seconds, the second in another 26-second decline, and the third in
a jump another 86 seconds! By taking staff away, service worsens and it does
so dramatically at some point. There are especially big jumps as our staff
number gets closer and closer to the hours of workload.
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You can view this as both good news and bad news. The good news is that if
youre delivering poor service in your call center, you can improve it dramatically
by adding just one more person. On the other hand, when service levels are
mediocre to bad, one more person dropping out can send service into such a
downhill slide that its nearly impossible to recover.
Calculating Shrinkage and Schedule Requirements
The numbers weve discussed so far are purely bodies in chairs numbers.
These numbers assume that all agents are always available to handle call
workload.
But we all know that agents arent available much of the time. And we have to
factor in this unavailability into our schedule requirements so we end up with
enough staff to man the phones.
In calculating staff requirements, a final adjustment needs to be made to factor
in all the activities and situations that make staff unproductive. We refer to
this unproductive time as staff shrinkage and define it as any time for which staff
are being paid but not available to handle calls. We include such activities as
breaks, meetings, training sessions, off-phone work, and general unproductive or
where the heck are they? time.
In most centers, staff shrinkage ranges from 20 35%. We account for this
shrinkage factor in our staff requirement by dividing the Erlang staff requirement
by the productive staff percentage (or 1 minus the shrinkage percentage). In
our example, if 24 staff are needed and our shrinkage factor is 30%, then 24/.7
yields a requirement of 34 schedules.
Next Steps
In the next article in this series, well help you understand a few more of the
numbers associated with call center staffing including the effect of arrival rate,
calculations of staff occupancy, and impact of size on call center efficiencies.
Well also discuss how workload calculations and staffing models are different
when planning resources for handling other channels of communications such as
outbound calls or emails.
About the Author.
Penny Reynolds is a Founding Partner of The Call Center School, a company that provides a wide
range of educational offerings for call center professionals. Penny is a popular industry speaker and is the
author of numerous call center management books, including Call Center Staffing: The Complete,
Practical Guide to Workforce Management and Call Center Supervision: The Complete Guide for Managing
Frontline Staff. She can be reached at 615-812-8410 or by email at:
[email protected].

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