Help Desk Occupancy

[wannabe21]

In our company occupancy for the Help Desk isn't a priority, but we do have a certain percent that needs to be met every month. How high does occupancy have to be for an internal Support Desk (Help Desk)?

[dlexmond]

There are two factors that will determine your definition of acceptable occupancy:

1. The service level that you want to provide to your internal clients;

2. The stress you want to place on your Help Desk staff.

If you are OK with long wait times, you can make do with relatively fewer staff, who then will have to work harder to respond to calls. If your clients are waiting in queue for the next available help desk person, your staff will have to take call after call after call and will be stressed, and burn out over time. So you will need to find a balance between providing decent service and keeping your staff busy.

[Ricky Perez]

Hi Mark,

I think the prior post is excellent advice. That post raised intersting points that might require more attention:

HOW do you measure occupancy? Most help desks prefer to use a "ticket" measuring method. This method has the virtue of measuring the types of problems that are occuring within the organization and can be used to determine future changes to the business systems. But, this method tends to neglect the workload of the help-agents which can cause burnout stress. I have seen a method that uses a two-track measuring rating: 'Tickets' (like above) and collecting data on how long it takes for the help desk staff to resolve them, including # of calls to resolve, length of time away from desk to find answers etc. This second measure is useful in understanding the length of time it takes to resolve problems. Naturally, this does not exclude the standard ACD occupancy measures (ex: talk-time, ACW, Aux etc.).

- - - Good Luck! Ricky