How many agents you need for phone support

Phone does not scale the way email does. Two agents cover far less than people assume, and here is why.

Phone does not scale the way email does. Two agents cover far less than people assume, and here is why.

Calls are exclusive

An agent on a call is handling one thing. Ten emails can be in progress at once; one call cannot. That single fact is why phone staffing works differently from everything else.

The arithmetic people skip

Take calls per hour, multiply by average call length, and you have how many agent-hours of talking you need. Then add the work after each call, which is often as long as the call itself.

Then add slack, because calls do not arrive evenly. A team sized exactly to average volume is at capacity half the time and idle the other half.

Two is not a phone team

With two agents, both being on calls is common, and the third caller reaches voicemail. Somebody at lunch halves your capacity. Somebody ill removes it.

Three or four is where phone starts to behave, and that is a real cost to weigh against the value of offering it.

Peaks matter more than averages

Calls cluster: Monday morning, after a mailing, when something breaks. Sizing to the average means the peak is always a bad experience, and the peak is when most people ring.

What to do with less

Narrower published hours with reliable answering beat wide hours with voicemail. A number answered promptly between ten and four is a better service than one that rings out all day.

See also

• Preparing to offer phone support
• Setting up voicemail
• What Zendesk WFM forecasting does