Outbound campaign staffing calculator
Outbound has no queue; it has a list. The work is attempts, of which some connect and take talk and wrap time while the rest take a few seconds each. Enter the list, how many attempts each record gets, the contact rate and the times, and the calculator gives the agent-hours the campaign needs and the agents per day to finish on time.
To finish in 10 days.
- Agent-hours for the campaign
- 1,585.0 h
- Conversations
- 15,000
- Attempts
- 50,000
- Connects per agent per hour
- 9.5
- Records closed per day
- 2,000
Show the working
- Attempts = 20000 × 2.5 = 50000; at 30% contact rate, 15000 conversations and 35000 failed attempts.
- Agent time = 15000 × (240 + 60) s + 35000 × 10 s = 1347.2 h, ÷ 85% occupancy = 1585.0 agent-hours.
- Over 10 days at 6 productive hours, 1585.0 ÷ 60 = 26.4 agents a day, rounded up to 27.
- Each agent makes 9.5 connects an hour.
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 outbound staffing is calculated
Multiply records by attempts per record for the dials, then split them by contact rate into conversations and failures. Conversations cost talk plus wrap; failures cost whatever the dialler mode leaves on the agent, from nothing on a predictive dialler to half a minute of listening to ringing on a manual one.
Total agent time divided by occupancy gives agent-hours, since even on a dialler agents are not on a call every second. Spread over the campaign's days and productive hours per day, that is agents per day. The connects-per-hour figure is the productivity benchmark team leaders will recognise.
The model has no queue, so there is no Erlang slack; the constraint is throughput. The things that move the answer most are contact rate, which depends on the time of day you dial and the list quality, and attempts per record, which is a policy choice with a cost.
Frequently asked questions
- What contact rate should I assume?
- It depends on the list and the hours. Warm customer lists dialled in the evening reach 35 to 50 per cent; cold business lists in the morning 15 to 25. Use the last similar campaign's rate, and expect it to fall over the campaign as the easy contacts are made.
- Does a predictive dialler change the calculation?
- It sets the failed-attempt time near zero and lets occupancy run higher, so the same list needs fewer agent-hours. It also needs enough agents to predict for; below about ten the pacing algorithm has little to work with.
- How do I blend outbound with inbound?
- Size inbound with the Erlang calculators for its peaks, and put outbound into the troughs, where the agent capacity calculator shows how much idle time exists. Outbound is the ideal filler for the intervals the inbound curve leaves empty.
Embed this calculator on your site
Paste this where you want the calculator. It stays free and ad-free, updates when we improve it, and the line under it credits the source.
Stop doing this one interval at a time
Pebble WFM forecasts your demand, computes the staffing requirement for every interval, builds the roster and publishes it, with self-service for agents and a copilot that can do what a planner can. Explore a sample organisation on day one.