Everything You Wanted to Know About Occupancy Rates in a Call Center

Occupancy rate is a measure of how effectively an agent’s time is utilized in a call center.

It reflects the amount of time agents spend handling calls compared to their available working hours. The amount of time agents spend handling calls includes talk time, hold time, after-call work, and time spent on emails, chats, and other non-voice channels.

With the rise of virtual call centers, managers and supervisors need to stay on top of customer interactions. It becomes necessary to understand the amount of time agents spend interacting with customers and resolving their queries.

Modern call centers aim to have an occupancy rate between 85% and 90%. It is calculated not only for budgetary and staffing needs but also to maintain the health and well-being of employees.

A low occupancy rate of >70% could be due to overstaffing issues or low volumes of calls, resulting in financial waste. Conversely, an occupancy rate upwards of 90% means agents have no time between calls, which can negatively affect their mental health in the long term.

You should always aim for a balanced occupancy rate of around 85%, tending towards 90%.

Why Is Occupancy Rate Important?

It Helps You Assess the Efficiency of Your Call Center

A high occupancy rate means agents spend most of their time productively handling calls or completing related tasks.

A low occupancy rate means underutilization, leading to wasted resources.

It Helps You Keep Workloads Sane

Extreme high rates (of over 90%) can lead to agent burnout due to insufficient breaks. Overworked agents may be less empathetic with customers and will have a great urge to leave the job. This is one of the reasons for high attrition rates in call centers.

You should always aim towards a balanced occupancy rate.

It Helps in Planning Your Staffing

Enables managers to accurately forecast staffing requirements, ensuring the right number of agents are available to handle call volumes. This helps maintain optimal service levels while avoiding overstaffing and understaffing, which can impact operational efficiency and costs.

It Improves Customer Experience

By aligning staffing with demand, you can minimize customer wait times, improve first-call resolution rates, and deliver consistent, high-quality service. This increases customer satisfaction while fostering loyalty.

How Do You Calculate the Agent Occupancy Rate?

Here is the formula:

Agent occupancy rate (%) = (Total handling time/Total logged time) x 100.

Total handling time is the total amount of time advisors spend on call-related activity from the time they sign in to the time they sign out. This includes time spent on calling, holding, and after-call work.

Total logged time is the time that the agents are signed in over the day.

Let us look at some examples to make sense of this formula.

Assume that your agent logs in at 9 am and logs out at 5 pm. It is a total of 480 minutes (Total logged time). Of this, the agent spends 260 minutes on call, 60 minutes on hold, and 100 minutes on after-call work. The total handling time will be the sum of these three.

What will be the occupancy rate?

Agent occupancy rate (%) = ([260+60+100]/480) x 100 = 87.5%

This is a high occupancy rate, which means the agent is at his peak efficiency.

Now, let us reduce the amount of time the agent spends on calls by 40 minutes (it becomes 220 minutes) and the amount of time on after-call work to 80 minutes; then, the total handling time will be 360 minutes.

Now, the agent occupancy rate will be = (360/480) x 100 = 75%

This will be a low occupancy rate. While this is not bad, it ought to be improved so that your call center can function efficiently.

Now, let us increase the number of minutes the agent is on call from 260 to 300, then the total handling time will be 460 minutes, and the agent occupancy rate will be 96%.

This is a very high occupancy rate, which is not healthy for the agents, as this may result in operational inefficiencies and high attrition rates.

How Do You Maintain and Optimize Occupancy Rates in a Call Center?

There are multiple ways of doing them. Here are four strategies you must certainly adopt for an efficient call center operation.

1. Balance Staffing Levels

While hiring more agents or laying off agents may be the easy solution to reduce very high occupancy rates and low occupancy rates, they may not be the appropriate solution at all times – due to budget constraints, labor shortages, and employee morale.

A more nuanced approach will be to adjust staffing levels strategically.

For instance, during the Black Friday sale, the retail call centers will encounter a spike in call volumes. You cannot possibly be recruiting full-time advisors to handle this spike. Instead, you should temporarily increase staff using part-time agents or have your existing advisors stretch a bit during the peak seasons.  

Likewise, during off-peak seasons, reduce your staffing levels by assigning your agents to training sessions and project work, which helps align with the actual demand.

2. Engage Your Agents Proactively

Engaged agents are productive and are less likely to feel overwhelmed, which can positively impact occupancy rates. A supportive and motivating environment is key to retaining top talent in high-pressure roles.

For instance, a cloud-based food delivery service center introduced gamification into its daily operations. Agents earned points for resolving issues efficiently and for maintaining high customer satisfaction levels.

This competitive and fun environment boosted morale and reduced burnout while keeping occupancy rates high.

Look at this example. There are call centers where managers have implemented ‘wellness breaks,’ giving agents time to recharge. It works something like this – every agent takes a 10-minute break every two hours on a rotational basis.

This keeps your agents focused with a balanced workload throughout the day.

3. Leverage Self-Service AI

AI-powered self-service tools can help you effectively manage occupancy rates. How about handling routine queries through bots or IVR systems? This can reduce the call volumes, easing the workload of your agents.

A telecom company analyzed their calls using automated analytics tools and figured that 40% of their calls involved bill payments or usage checks. They implemented self-service channels to handle these routine queries. This freed up the agents’ time, allowing them to handle complex queries with enough time between calls to prepare, leading to higher customer satisfaction and balanced occupancy rates.

Some Good Practices to Follow to Achieve Balanced Occupancy Rates

• Aim for an occupancy rate between 80% and 90% to balance productivity and agent well-being.
• Leverage workforce management (WFM) tools to track occupancy and make adjustments.
• Align staffing with call volume patterns using predictive analytics – avoid overstaffing and understaffing.
• Incorporate short breaks into schedules, especially during peak hours, to prevent fatigue.

Occupancy rate is one of the key metrics for call centers to measure. Effectively managing occupancy rates can reduce stress among your agents, which leads to lower attrition, higher customer satisfaction, and added savings on recruiting and training.

When this metric is used in tandem with other metrics like net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, first contact resolution (FCR), and customer effort score (CES), you can find greater employee engagement and loyal customers due to improved customer experiences.