% of customer base calling in

[Blake7]

Anyone have an industry standard for what % of your customer base should be calling tech support in a day, week, year for most technology related companies?

[JoeB]

There is no single number that represents the percentage of customers calling in. This ratio depends on the audience knowledge and skill level, as well as the rate in which reasons to call arise, such as failure rate of the system(s) or equipment they use. In addition to these, there are more subtle factors such as usersÂ’ motivation to solve problems themselves an their expectations from technical support.

One of our surveys shows a range between 0.1 calls and 4.5 calls per user per month. This is a ratio of 1:45, which translates into approximately a 30-fold change in headcount.

If indeed you want to use the rate of calls per user as a guide to determine staffing, I strongly recommend that you use a different approach. Not only is this number unreliable, but, more importantly, calls do not arrive in an orderly fashion one after the other, requiring a more complex calculation. See www.DiagnosticStrategies/traffic_modeling.htm for a detailed explanation.

Joe