Occupancy VS utilization

[DasClosur]

Could someone provide me info on the difference in calculation between agent utilization and agent occupancy. I have seen a few different ways for calculating both lately but have a hard time drawing a distinct difference between the two.

Thanks in Advance.

[MPage]

I think you need to further define what you are trying to achieve when you talk about Occupancy vs Utilization. Simply due to the fact these may mean slightly different things to different companies. For example - when we talk about Occupancy - we are refering to the time an agent is occupied on a call or in post call work. Based on what we can get from our switch - the formula we use is the inverse of idle or available time. 1-(idle time/manned time).
When we refer to Utilization - we are looking at how exactly our staff time was spent or how the agent was utilized. For utilization we can see what % of time was spent on Vacation, training, disability, non-adherence, etc. The bottom line of our utilization is a design factor which tells us of the hours we hired people to work, what percent of time are they actually giving us toward inbound work. i.e. 53% of time is spent inbound - rest of time is on breaks, vacations, meetings, etc.

[Tracy Royal]

I am not a workforce/resource planning expert, so I called one of the best in the industry.

This is his explaination:

Let's say you had someone who was scheduled for 8 hours in their work day. They had a 30 minute team meeting that was scheduled and 2 15 minute breaks. Even though they were technically at work for 8 hours, they only worked (talk time+wrap time) for 6 hours and 1 hour was spent waiting for a call and the other hour was in the team meetings and for the breaks...

Utilization = work time/paid hours
6 hours/8 hours
Usually this is used for financial reporting (more than productivity) to find out how much a person costs vs. how much they actually worked.

Occupancy = work time/hours logged in
6 hours/7 hours
This is used to find out overall productivity. You want a high occupancy percentage because it means that you are fully utilizing your staff and they are not sitting around waiting for a call.

Hope this helps (and that I translated it properly).

[Rebecca Oettinger]

DasClosur.

According to Purdue University's Benchmark Portal, occupancy rate is equal to (talk time + hold time + after call work time) divided by (talk time + hold time + after call work time + idle time) times 100.

Utilization rate is the amount of time an agent is actually working divided by their time at work. For example, if an agent shows 7.5 hours of time assisting customers divided by an 8 hour day their utilization rate would be 94%. The difference could be due to vacation time, non-adherence, training, etc.

Good luck!

Rebecca Oettinger, Consultant
Sibson Consulting, The Segal Company
p: 609.520.2779 f: 609.520.0369

[syedumairnaseer]

so how do you differentiate between talk time occupancy and work time occupancy,

Talk time occupancy = talk time / produced hrs

work time occupancy = (talk + hold + after call time)/produced hrs

correct??


Syed Umair Naseer
MIS
The Resource Group - Pakistan