How to calculate the number of Agents Needed?

Most of recruiters and HR professionals face a daily arguments with Sales and customer service managers concerning the hiring requests of sales and call center agents (New hires not replacements). Here you are a way to help you to validate the requests and to balance between workload and agents;

Sales Agents Workload Formula:

Number of sales people= (Number of Accounts * Frequency of sales calls * Length of a sales call) / selling time available for one sales person.

For example: If the sales person is available for selling 8 hours (8*60= 480 mins) a day on 2 accounts or 2 products and an average of 50 customers a day require sales calls and each call takes about 15 mins. So, the number of sales people = (2*50*15)/480=3 sales people are needed to tackle the whole sales tasks.

Breaks time should be eliminated from your calculation to get the pure selling time available for the sales person.

Call Center Agents Workload Formula:

It's the same for the call center agents as the number of agents needed for a call center= (Number of Accounts * Frequency of inbound and outbound calls * Length of a call) / time available for one call center agent.

So If you 4 brands the call center is serving and you receive about 1000 calls a day with average 3 minutes for each call and the time available for each agent is 6 hours (6*60=360 minutes) then the number of call center agents needed is (4*1000*3)/360=33 agent will be able to handle calls efficiently.

This very simple formula will helps you a lot to validate the necessary number of agents needed to manage and tackle the workload effectively without adding any fat to the organization and at the end If you can't measure, you can't manage.