How to Manage Occupancy

This blog is part of a series focused on solving contact centers’ top concerns. 

Contact centers build in some downtime for agents during working hours due to lulls in incoming calls because of the occupancy level needed to realize their service level goals. It’s a balancing act: Keep employees busy, but don’t overwork them. But how do you know when busy becomes too busy?

Contact center leaders charged with increasing efficiency while delivering on customer service imperatives measure and monitor the amount of time agents spend on activities like talking to customers or performing post-call tasks. When agents are too busy, however, as indicated by consistently high occupancy levels, they can quickly become burned out and be at risk of attrition.

Agent occupancy, an important consideration for budgeting and resource planning, essentially measures how busy agents are.  Occupancy represents the percentage of logged-in time that employees are occupied, performing call center activities. The inverse of occupancy, or 100% minus the occupancy rate, is the amount of time employees are waiting for calls to arrive. This is also known as availability or idle time.

A higher occupancy rate generally indicates a more efficient call center in terms of workforce management (WFM) and labor costs. Occupancy rates in the high 90% range, however, can indicate that employees have an extremely high workload. This in turn can lead to fatigue, poor performance and eventually high turnover as well as lower service levels, causing longer wait times for customers. 

A low occupancy rate, on the other hand, can indicate poor planning or scheduling -- too many employees are waiting for calls to arrive. This can lead to poor morale and employee dissatisfaction. Other factors that can affect occupancy include Not Ready, Unavailable and Auxiliary Time; each allows employees to stay logged in but unavailable for calls, thus affecting occupancy. Not Ready codes like breaks, meetings and training account for up 8% to 10% of shrinkage in a typical contact center.

Contact centers can manage occupancy through a few key best practices:

• Hire the correct number of employees, with the right skills and abilities.
• Manage occupancy levels at different points of the day to establish benchmarks.
• Ask employees to handle different tasks (work items) during quiet periods. Ideally, your workforce management solution will handle this automatically.
• Use internal staff for normal call volume and BPO for peak volumes.
• Try to push some volume to other media channels, such as email, that do not require the same service level objectives, to smooth out workload. 

Keeping agents productive yet available for the next call so service levels are met is a balancing act, but one that can be quantified and optimized by better managing occupancy.  Workforce management (WFM) solutions can help. Learn more about how the NICE WFM Suite is helping contact centers take a multi-pronged approach to managing occupancy.