Phones

[jcopley]

Is there a formula for how many people I need to answer the phones, booking agents? I'm getting 400 plus calls a day and the two i have are not able to keep up. 

Is there any data out there that gives best practices for this issue? 

[Dave]

I use average call time + 90 seconds.  This has helped me a bunch.

[jcopley]

Dave, we've adjusted that number around to see what fits best for us. I don't know if we have tried 90 seconds though, thanks for the feedback! 

[Dave]

No worries.

I find the 90 seconds allows for miscellaneous and once a CSR gets on a bit of a run, the additional times cover breaks and meals.  If you're still slammed, you need additional CSR's or need to increase your prices 😉

Good luck!

[Daniel_Rajotte · Accepted solution]

I'm sure someone will be able to point you towards a decent resource or study for this, but I can give you an easy way to calculate this on your own. If you take your average call number per day over a week or a month (longer time frame means more data and generally more accurate average) then divide that by the average number of calls your call takers are able to answer individually over the same time frame. This will give you the number of call takers you would need to handle your call intake. So if you take 400 calls per day on average and your CSRs average 100 calls answered per day you would need 4 CSRs to handle your call volume. 

The formula would look like this:
400 (Avg Calls) / 100 (CSR Avg) = 4 (# of CSRs)

[jcopley]

Thanks so much, this aligned with my theory that we need 4 CSR's, I just didn't have a formula to back that up.