What is Occupancy in a Call center?
A specific call center's performance depends on the productivity of agents. Hence a call center defines various parameters to gauge an agent's performance. A few of these parameters are Log in Hrs, AHT, Aux %, Occupancy, etc.
One of the important parameters to gauge an agent's productivity of efficiency is the Occupancy rate
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| What is Occupancy in a Call center? |
Let's understand the topic of Occupancy in a Call center in detail :
Before understanding the topic let's get an insight about What is Occupancy ?
What is Occupancy?
This term can be used as the efficiency of an individual. When we talk about the occupancy of an individual we are talking about How much occupied he was during a particular time interval or a day
In call center, we calculate the efficiency of an agent by calculating his occupancy rate
What is Occupancy in the Call Center?
Occupancy can be termed as the active time of an agent spent on the system out of the entire day he was logged in
Here we are referring to "Active Time" as AHT (Average Handling Time)
Formula for AHT = (Talk time +Hold Time + Wrap Time)
We can understand this calculation by a simple example
Example: Ravi, an agent logged in the morning at 8 AM and completed the shift at 5 PM. During the day he took over 100 calls and for every call, he spent Avg 3 mins (Including after-call activity) on call. Now the total sum of AHT is 300 minutes and the total sum of his time in the office is 540 mins
To calculate the Occupancy rate we should divide AHT to Sum of time spent in the office and multiply the result to100.
Occupancy % = (300/540)*100 =56%
Most of us puzzled the term "Occupancy" with a different term "Utilization". Though these 2 terms are a bit similar, while calculation Utilization, we take the total time spent by an agent in the office which includes ( Training time, Idle Time, meetings, etc.)
As per the call center standard, the max occupancy should not be exceeded 85% -90%
The drawback of higher occupancy
Low Quality: If we push agents to attain max occupancy agents start taking calls without considering call quality. Quality Parameter which is an important parameter in the customer service domain
So if we expect a better call quality from agents we should give time to agents to pick the next calls. Nevertheless, during peak hours or months, this occupancy can go high which is required to maintain the service level as decided by the client
In some cases, it is found that when we push the agents for more calls they start to misbehave with customers and clients which adversely affect the image of the call center
Higher Attrition: Agents can easily burn out if they will receive continuous calls. This is one of the biggest problems for small call centers where the attrition rate is very high. Pushing the agents to take maximum calls and with the high rate of occupancy can lead to higher attrition
Low Productivity: If we are expecting High occupancy from agents they start work dodging and find different ways to avoid calls, which can lead to client escalation also results in low productivity
The best Occupancy rate for a call center is 85% -90%. In any case, the occupancy rate should not go higher than 90%. Having said that we also need to understand that in few specific intervals where the call volume is very high the Occupany might go up to 95% but this trend should not happen throughout the day
Difference Between Occupancy and Utilization
These 2 terms often create puzzles. We will help you with the best way to find the difference between Occupancy and Utilization
As discussed above Occupancy rate is the Percentage of agents spent time on-call divided by productive log in time
while Utilization is instead calculated as the amount of time that agents spent logged in for the day, handling calls/ chats, and idle (expecting calls), while present in the call center.
Utilization % includes below activities also:
- Training and Quality session, conducted by support staff
- Team Meetings with leaders
- Bio Break/ Lunch Break
- Any office work related to the process or project
- System Downtime
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