How many telephone headsets for your call centre?

The call centre constant calculator

I read an interesting little calculation today on a website about call centre management, it was how to work out how many operators you need in your call centre – this was assuming that it was at least 25 people there.
Well you initially look at the volume of calls – naturally this does make a difference. Call Volume is measured in calls per hour. Secondly it is necessary to have an estimate of the average call duration ( measured in seconds ) – this is not only how long the call takes, but any secondary time associated with the interaction such as note taking, passing on information or task delegation.

In order to calculate your call centre operator requirements from this data you multiply Calls Per Hour with Task Duration ( Call + Secondary ) and divide the result by 3200.

It is not clear as to what additional figures may also be germane to this formula, but one could, of course adjust the ‘3200’ by a certain percentage either way to take into account other circumstances such as toilet break frequency, length of lunch breaks and staff sickness probability but I am sure these all average out.

This got me thinking about how to calculate number of telephone headsets required to provision a call centre and after much debate and statistical analysis I came up with this formula which is very useful for call/ help desk managers or telecoms procurement executives.
First you take the number of operators you have – this is an integer and is measured in units of people – if you employ say 38 telephone operators, say, then this number is 38. What you do next is divide this number by 12 ( and round it off to the nearest number – in this case 38/12 comes to about 3) and add it to the initial number – making 41.
Hence, if you employ 38 operators you will need around 41 headsets.

Interactive Call Center Calculator

Now you may ask why there is this disparity between the number of heads and the number of headsets, but here is the reason for this figure known as the callcentre constant( well from now on it can be ): there will always be a percentage of either damage, loss or malfunction to your headsets and its a good idea to maintain a few in hand to cover such eventualities, meaning a continuation of service whilst waiting for repair or replacement.

Best4Systems supply TELEPHONE HEADSETS to many offices, businesses and call centres and offer a repair and replacement service as well as cheap headsets from leading manufacturers such as Poly, Plantronics,EPOS | Sennheiser, Jabra and Avalle.