How to Develop a Productive Agent Occupancy Rate

Just because your agents are busy, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are productive.

Agent occupancy rates are often taken as mere values that indicate the amount of workload agents are handling—the higher the occupancy rate, the higher the volume of calls are being attended to.

Plainly put, occupancy rates just show how busy your agents are. What it fails to measure is the overall agent effectivity in delivering quality services.

Having a high occupancy rate can bring about counterproductive results in your services. Aiming to hit an unrealistic value of 95% in your occupancy rate can cause several problems such as:

• agent burnout
• high agent turnover rates
• lengthy and unproductive calls
• low customer satisfaction

Here are 3 things you should keep in mind to create a productive occupancy rate:

Proper scheduling

Increasing the number of agents can be costly while decreasing it can minimize work output.

Therefore, you have to identify your peak and quiet hours to help you assign the proportion of agent-related activities. As much as possible, you have to avoid the tendency of having idle agents around.

During quiet hours, agents who are on standby should be assigned to return the calls of customers who were left to be given a callback.

Also, agents can make outbound calls and solicit customer feedback or suggest other related products or services to loyal customers.

Effective calling time

Handling time directly affects occupancy rates for customer service outsourcing in the Philippines—the longer the call time equates to a loss of opportunity to attend to other calls.

Moreover, a lengthy call time is counterproductive since it requires an investment of time which customers find inconvenient on their part. Customers look for services that are quick and easy.

However, shortening handling time to increase occupancy rate is not the solution to the problem either. Imposing time-pressure can decrease the quality of your services.

Therefore, it is recommended to channel calls to the appropriate agents for lesser handling time to ensure both customer satisfaction and quality service.

Outsourced services

During peak hours, the ratio of customers on queue and customers waiting for an available agent to attend to their call is high and will lower your customer service quality.

Not only that, a high volume of inbound calls will exhaust your agents. At all costs, you have to avoid poor performance especially during demanding seasons.

Having enough resources will equip you in solving the dilemma.

Outsourcing agents is cost-effective and helpful because you can share the influx of calls with external resources and they can bring in new ideas to develop your services.

Conclusion

True enough, good customer service should excel in quality before quantity. What good is a high occupancy rate when you discredit the condition of your agents and the satisfaction of your customers?

With the right strategies and adequate resources, your company will not only have a high occupancy rate but a productive one at that.

Make sure that your services are more inclined to be at its optimal shape rather than focusing on a big number of headcount.

© Yury Zap / Dollar Photo Club