PebbleWFM

Is your call target reasonable? The maths behind calls per day and occupancy

For agents and team leaders: what a daily call target, an occupancy figure and time between calls mean, and how to check whether yours is achievable at your handle time.

Published

Most call targets are set by someone dividing yesterday’s volume by yesterday’s headcount and rounding up. Whether the result is achievable depends on four numbers, and none of them is effort. This guide is for the people on the receiving end of a target: what the numbers mean, how to work out what is possible at your handle time, and which conversations are worth having.

The four numbers

Handle time. Talk plus hold plus wrap-up, per contact. Yours is on your stats; the team’s average is on the wall. Five minutes is common for consumer voice.

Occupancy. The share of your available time you spend on a contact. Not the share of your shift: the share of the time you are logged in and ready. 85 per cent is the ceiling most planners consider sustainable; above 90 for weeks at a time is where absence and attrition rise.

Productive hours. Your shift less breaks, meetings, coaching and anything else that is not the queue. An eight-hour shift with the usual allowances is about 6.4 productive hours.

Time between contacts. The thing you notice. It is the other side of occupancy: at 85 per cent, about nine minutes of every hour is waiting for the next contact, unevenly distributed.

The calculation

Contacts per productive hour is 3,600 seconds times occupancy, divided by handle time. At a five-minute handle time and 85 per cent occupancy: 3,600 × 0.85 ÷ 300 is 10.2 contacts an hour. Over 6.4 productive hours that is 65 contacts a shift.

Now a target of 70 a day. At the same handle time it needs 6.9 productive hours at 85 per cent, or 5.8 hours at 100 per cent occupancy, which is no gap between any two contacts all day. It is achievable only by cutting handle time to about 280 seconds, or by working through breaks. At a three-minute handle time, 70 is comfortable. The target is not reasonable or unreasonable on its own; it is reasonable at a handle time, and that is the question to ask.

What occupancy tells you

If you are consistently above 90 per cent occupancy, the queue is short of people. That is not a judgement of you, it is arithmetic: there are more contacts than the staffed agents can take with any slack. Service level will be poor in the same intervals, and no amount of speed on your part changes it, because every contact you finish faster is replaced by the next one in the queue.

If you are consistently below 70 per cent, the queue is over-staffed for those intervals, or the roster has put too many people in the quiet part of the day. That is worth raising too, because it is where coaching and training could go instead.

Conversations worth having

  • “What handle time is this target based on?” If the answer is the team average and yours is higher because your calls are different, the target is wrong for you, not the other way round.
  • “What occupancy does this assume?” If nobody knows, the target was set by division rather than by planning. The agent capacity calculator will tell you what occupancy it implies.
  • “Is the time between contacts counted as mine?” It should not be. Waiting for the next contact is the planner’s slack, not idle time you chose.
  • “What happens to the target when volume spikes?” A target in contacts per day rises and falls with the queue. A target in occupancy or adherence does not, which is why good centres measure agents on adherence and quality rather than volume.

Try it with your own numbers

Put in your handle time and shift, and see what a day’s target looks like at 85 per cent occupancy.

Inputs
Shift
s

Talk plus hold plus wrap-up.

%

Share of available time spent handling. 85% is a sustainable ceiling for voice.

h
%

Breaks, coaching, meetings and other off-phone time as a share of the shift.

Team

To size a team's daily capacity.

Results
Contacts per agent per shift
65.3

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

Even arrivals; no Erlang slack.

Handling time per shift
5.4 h
Show the working
  1. One productive hour at 85% occupancy holds 3,600 × 0.85 = 3060 seconds of handling, which is 10.2 contacts at 300 s each.
  2. A 8-hour shift less 20% shrinkage is 6.40 productive hours, so 10.2 × 6.40 = 65.3 contacts per agent per shift.
  3. 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.

Where next

Frequently asked questions

I am at 92 per cent occupancy and service level is still 20 per cent. Is that my fault?
No. Occupancy that high means you are on a contact almost every minute you are available; there is nothing more one person can do. Service level is set by how many people are staffed against how many contacts arrive, and at 92 per cent occupancy the queue is under-staffed. That is a planning number, not a performance one.
Why is there sometimes no time between calls and sometimes ten minutes?
Because contacts arrive at random and the roster is built for an average. In a busy interval the queue never empties; in a quiet one you wait. Both are the same staffing plan. The average of the two is the occupancy the planner chose.

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.

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