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Definition of what Occupancy is, what it means, and how contact centers can use it as a goal.
Calabrio Shorts is a fun-sized podcast that covers all sorts of topics around the contact center industry. No topic is off-limits as we cover frequently asked questions, industry trends and definitions, and yes, we will have fun doing it.
What is Occupancy
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Dave Hoekstra: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of Calabrio shorts. We are very excited today to be talking about the contact center concept of occupancy. Occupancy is one of those things. It's easy to understand, but difficult to master in a lot of ways. And so what we've done is we've brought in a resident expert here from the Calabrio stables, so to speak.
Got my good friend and colleague Joe here. And Joe comes to us with quite a bit of contact center experience, but why don't you not hear that from me? Let Joe tell you. So Joe, tell us a little bit about your background, where you came from, what you do and how you got.
Joe Presutti: All right. Thanks Dave. So I started in call centers about 20 years ago.
I worked in workforce management, started from real time analyst, worked my way up to lead the workforce management team. Then eventually vice president of the call center. So about, over about a 15 year period, I was in workforce management all every day, all day came here to Calabrio about two and a half years ago.
I'm a WFM consultant. So I lead configuration and training workshops [00:01:00] with the customers. When we, when they purchased the WFM software. A lot of experience, a lot of nerdiness when it comes to WFM.
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah. And let me ask you this, when you were growing up, did you want to be a WFM analyst? Is that the career path you were shooting for?
Joe Presutti: It wasn't I had no idea what WFM was when I was growing up, but once I learned it, it was like it just gets in your brain and you love it so much. And it's
Dave Hoekstra: wonderful. Absolutely, truth I cannot argue with that. All right. So let's get started here. The concept of occupancy, let's start at the basics with the definition.
So from your, in your mind, what is the definition of occupancy?
Joe Presutti: Basically the it's a percentage of time that the agents are busy. So if they're taking phone calls, it would be they're on call with the customer or they're an after call. In emails, it would be just working on emails or working on chats, but it's the time that they're busy versus the time that they're, I guess you would say idle when they're not, when they're waiting for calls or they're waiting for work to come to them.
Dave Hoekstra: So why does anyone care? Why does anyone care? What occupancy tells us? What's the reason [00:02:00] why someone would measure and look at occupancy.
Joe Presutti: There's a couple reasons. I think the main reason when you think about it, if your occupancy is too high, Then your agents can get burned out.
And when those agents are burned out, cause they're taking call after call or they're working email after email, then they tend to spend more time in after call work. They could get frustrated at the point where they even have, you have attrition because of that. So you want to, you wanna look at how that's impacting your call center agents or your contact center agents.
But also if it's too low, then you're wasting money in your company. So you have people sitting idle waiting for work, or are you overstaffed are you not allocating staff appropriately? There's a lot that can go into it. One
Dave Hoekstra: of the catch phrases I kind of always go with is the two worst things to happen in a contact center is customers waiting on agents and agents waiting on customers.
And basically occupancy is the measure of trying to balance those two things.
Joe Presutti: And like you said, it's not easy to master, like it's a very easy calculation to understand, but when you are [00:03:00] in the real world, trying to balance the workload balance, your, your agents, it's difficult.
Dave Hoekstra: So let's talk a little bit about the calculation and without getting too deep into which database fields we would use to calculate it, like how in general, would you calculate an occupancy? If someone was coming at this from a very new perspective, what kind of information would they need to calculate their occupancy?
Joe Presutti: So I think the most basic would be maybe a phone call. We'll use a phone call as an example. So they're on the phone and after call works, do you choose you, look at that handling time and divide it by the idle time or the waiting time. Now we're not going to include any shrinkage. So if they have a team meeting or they have a training that day that comes out of those denominator, ox codes, like lunch and break again, you take those things out.
So you're looking at time that they could be working, but they're idle waiting for work.
Dave Hoekstra: And I wanna make sure we're clear. When you say handling time, we're not talking about their average handling time. We're talking about the total duration of time that they spend. So looking at [00:04:00] their entire day, how much time did they work on a call and how much time did they spend waiting for a new call, for example?
Now, do you factor ACW into that? Yes. Yes, we do. You do? Okay. So we're gonna take talk plus hold plus wrap, divide it by total sign on time. Correct. Okay. Yeah. So in general, that's a very basic way of calculating. Now I understand that there are some pitfalls of using occupancy as a measure. Like what the top of your head, what would you say maybe some of those pitfalls are?
Joe Presutti: I think that the main one is again, accuracy in your forecasting and your SLA achievement. So if you. If you're not managing to a proper occupant number, if you don't calculate it, or if you are not doing it properly, you're going to find yourself, like I said, over or understaffed based on, your forecasting and your staffing need, because we're assuming that the occupancy is going to be this for this portion of time.[00:05:00]
And we're not getting that occupant maybe they're off the phone more than they should be, and we're just not able to, calls are waiting. They're not meeting their SLAs. That's the biggest one. And I think I've, what I've already talked about is. Burnout with the agents. You gotta be careful, you get to that 95, a hundred percent occupancy.
That's probably not a good place to be. It's just a lot of work and they're just not getting any breaths in between.
Dave Hoekstra: It's like a marathon where you're expecting the person to sprint the entire marathon. They have to ebb and flow their pace back and forth throughout the day. And we can expect agents to
be a hundred percent occupied for maybe a day or two. The, I flash back to my very first real customer service job where for about six to eight months straight, there were 30 calls in queue. The minute I walked into the door and there were 30 calls in queue when I walked out of the door all day long every day.
And just how all of the agents just walked out with like zombies. Looking like zombies, glassy, eye, That's what it's like. And in today's day and age, it's too [00:06:00] easy to go find a new job. Yeah. And so that's where these corporations have to be careful with measuring their occupancy. So you do recommend looking at occupancy as a KPI for the health of the contact center.
Joe Presutti: Yeah, I think on a monthly basis that should be looked at. And when I talk to customers and we get into talking about occupancy, when we're configuring WFM, we talk about, I ask, where do you think you are? And a lot of them are just not really sure. They're not sure how to calculate they have. They just haven't used it before.
What's nice about Calabrio. You could put in a, a minute max and have the system forecast in like a, between 40% and 70% or between 30%, 85% Know, You could put that in there. And then once you start forecasting and you start using the tool, you could pull reports and see what your occupancy is.
You can see in your forecast, how the system is forecasting the occupancy throughout the day or for the day. And I think that's all great, but I think really you wanna look at occupancy, the monthly level because that's where you're gonna get the most bang for your buck. How overall total monthly, how is my occupancy looking.
Dave Hoekstra: The biggest mistakes I've [00:07:00] seen is holding agents accountable for their occupancy. That's a really bad idea. Wouldn't you agree?
Joe Presutti: Absolutely. Yeah. I think you can hold them accountable for their efficiency, but not for their occupancy. I think, when you look there not ready time, things like that, that's definitely wanna coach to that kind of thing, but it's tough to look at daily occupancy and coach to it.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay. So as hesitant as I am to wade into the murky waters of best practices and industry standards, I feel like it's worth at least a good discussion of what, if a company is looking at setting kind of a what they should be looking at, do you have some recommendations for kind of target goals for what occupancy should or should not be?
Joe Presutti: I think, with calls, you're looking between 80 and 90% occupancy. You don't want them taking call after call, but you also wanna make sure they're working with email. You're gonna be a little bit higher because they can handle those as they come in. It's a little bit better than talking to a customer.
You're able to just use your computer. So 95 to a hundred percent occupancy is the standard for email and for chat. When you have [00:08:00] concurring chats happening, you're gonna probably see more than a hundred percent occupancy with chat agents, but that's just, again, because they have, they can handle more than one at a time.
And those come in, rapid fire back and forth.
Dave Hoekstra: Whereas we want to be very clear. Calabrio not saying, oh, you, you should set your occupancy to 80%. It's a good starting point because the correlation between occupancy and some of the other metrics is very strong, right? If the higher your occupancy target, the fewer agents you do need.
But you also run the risk of running that engine too hot for too long. You lose staff and everybody else's occupancy goes up a little bit more and you kind of create this situation. That's really hard to get back in front of it, but we also, if you set it to 70%, I know lots of agents that would love to work in a contact center.
Where occupancy target is 70% because that means you're generally sitting probably three, four minutes between calls and you do have that chance to [00:09:00] breathe and we do want those to happen sometimes during the day. But balancing those two things out can actually be a little bit. And so that's where we want to be careful of when it comes to occupancy.
Yep. We've kind of covered the basics. I will say that one of the more advanced techniques is how to kind of manage occupancy almost in real time. How would you say that a contact center can affect that in the middle of the day? It's great to plan and it's great to have enough people, but in the middle of the day, when everything's on fire, how can we maybe what are some techniques we could maybe use?
Joe Presutti: Best case contact center is going to have a real time team. Who's watching real time displays, seeing where agents are seeing how the calls are coming in for all the channels. I think the real time team has a real they have the best opportunity to see what's happening and be able to.
Hey, I see on this team, our calls are low today. I see on this team, our calls are high today. Can I reallocate, do I have resources that could do both? Can I move people who are idle over here to help take these calls? Maybe the email volume's really high and the [00:10:00] call volume's really low. They, you can move people from calls to emails.
I think it's just having a realtime team. That's making those decisions in real time. Being able to move people around. I think the best opportunity that a center would have to increase their occupancy. If they're having issues there is to multi-skill their agents. If they have people who can take multiple different types of phone calls or multiple channels at, at one time and moving them in and out when needed, I think that's the best way that a real-time management team is able to try to manage that occupancy in real time, day over day.
But like I said, we wanna look at it at a monthly level. We could plan for it, but like you said, we. If we have opportunities, we have to take those. And if we have a real time team, that's looking at those things in real time. That's the, again, best case scenario.
Dave Hoekstra: Okay. So as kind of a summary and a wrap up here, what are your kind of three best practices?
What are the things that you would recommend that people kind of make sure they focus on when starting their journey with occupancy?
Joe Presutti: I think that number one would be, make it a KPI metric. You don't have to [00:11:00] put it on. Your agents reviews every year, but that's something that's a KPI should be monitored monthly.
How, is it going up? Is it going down? Is it staying the same? Look at it regularly. Make sure that it makes sense to you. If you have those days where, Hey, there's an outage of this day and that's why it's so low, you have to look at those things and make sure that you're checking it and making sure that the data is accurate and that you're able to track it.
And then third, I think it would be just have the real time team checking intraday occupancy to ensure that the staff is being utilized evenly as possible. You don't want to have one agent sitting idle for four hours. Another one taking calls back to back in four hours. They're gonna have some animosity.
Dave Hoekstra: So we do wanna look at it in real time, but we don't want to hold ourselves accountable for it in real time. Look at the average, not necessarily the micro measures during the day.
Joe Presutti: Yeah, cause I think you're gonna have those days where you are, maybe it's a Monday and you're super busy and you're gonna have occupancy at 85% or 90%.
Then you have that Thursday or Friday where you're a little bit slower and maybe it's down a little bit lower 80 or 75. So if you're looking at, in two granular, [00:12:00] you're gonna go crazy, cuz you're like, oh, why was it so high this day? And so low this day, I think when you look at it over a monthly level
you have more of an opportunity to see where it is and go from there.
Dave Hoekstra: That's fantastic. And I think we have checked all the boxes here on what occupancy is, and I feel like this is a great primer for a lot of people. And I really do feel like your expertise and knowledge here came in very handy.
So we really do appreciate it. Anything else you wanna say before we wrap up this episode of Calabrio shorts?
Joe Presutti: No, thank you very much for having
Dave Hoekstra: this was fun. Absolutely. So for those of you, listening If you need more information or more detail, make sure to visit Calabrio.com. Send us a message. Ask us a question.
We love to talk about this stuff. Joe even told me he'd be willing to come over to your house and have dinner with you to talk occupancy during the evening. So please, by all means let us know if there's more information we can provide here. And if you have a great idea for a next episode, let us know as well.
We'd be happy to try and cover it. So from me, Dave I appreciate the time, Joe. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. [00:13:00] And everybody else thank you for spending some time with us today and we'll see you on the next episode of Calabrio Shorts. Thanks everybody.