Agent capacity calculator
Whether you are sizing a team or checking whether a daily call target is fair, the answer comes from the same four numbers: handle time, occupancy, shift length and shrinkage. Enter them and the calculator gives contacts per productive hour, per shift and per day for a team, with the assumptions visible.
A fair daily target at this handle time and occupancy.
- Contacts per productive hour
- 10.2
- Productive hours per shift
- 6.4 h
- Team capacity per day
- 1,306
- Handling time per shift
- 5.4 h
Even arrivals; no Erlang slack.
Show the working
- One productive hour at 85% occupancy holds 3,600 × 0.85 = 3060 seconds of handling, which is 10.2 contacts at 300 s each.
- A 8-hour shift less 20% shrinkage is 6.40 productive hours, so 10.2 × 6.40 = 65.3 contacts per agent per shift.
- 20 agents × 65.3 = 1306 contacts a day for the team, if the work arrives evenly. Peaks need Erlang slack on top; see the staffing requirement calculator.
Doing this for every interval of the week? Pebble WFM computes the requirement from your forecast and builds the roster. Free month, no card needed.
How agent capacity is calculated
Capacity per productive hour is 3,600 seconds multiplied by occupancy, divided by handle time. At 300 seconds and 85 per cent occupancy that is 10.2 contacts an hour; the other 15 per cent of the hour is the gap between contacts that random arrivals make unavoidable.
Per shift, multiply by the productive hours: the shift less breaks, coaching and everything else that takes an agent off the phones. An eight-hour shift at 20 per cent shrinkage has 6.4 productive hours, so about 65 contacts. Daily targets set above the number this produces are asking for occupancy nobody sustains, or for handle time to be cut, and it is worth knowing which.
The team figure assumes contacts arrive to match the capacity, which they never quite do. It is a throughput ceiling, useful for back-office and outbound work, and an upper bound for inbound. The staffing requirement and week planner calculators add the slack a queue needs at the peak.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a target of 70 calls a day reasonable?
- At a five-minute handle time it needs 5.8 productive hours at 100 per cent occupancy or 6.9 at 85, which is a whole eight-hour shift with almost no shrinkage. At a three-minute handle time it is comfortable. Put your handle time in and see; the number is not reasonable or unreasonable on its own.
- Why is my actual volume per agent lower than this?
- Because inbound work does not arrive evenly. Quiet intervals cannot be banked for busy ones, so real occupancy across a day is below the ceiling you plan to at the peak. The gap is the price of answering quickly.
- Does this apply to chat and email?
- For email and tickets, yes, directly: work waits, so throughput is capacity. For chat, use the elapsed handle time at your concurrency and multiply the result by the concurrency.
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