Today’s customer experience (CX) leaders are focused on multiple ways of delivering an enhanced experience to their customers but often have little visibility into how effectively their team is working to deliver on this promise. Ticket related performance metrics, such as volume of tickets handled, average handle time (AHT), and first response time (FRT), provide part of the picture. But these metrics don't provide visibility into how effectively agents are using their time. This article describes how the supervisors of CX teams can get more clarity on this.
This article explains what occupancy is, how it's calculated, and why it's useful to know your occupancy. You'll learn how Zendesk's workforce management tool, Zendesk WFM, can help you visualize and accurately track the activities your agents perform in order to determine your occupancy rate.
What is occupancy and how is it calculated
Occupancy, or occupancy rate, is the amount of working time an agent spends on productive activities. This differs from agent utilization, another well-known metric. Agent utilization is the total amount of time an agent spends on productive tasks, which is used to help determine team capacity. Occupancy rate, by contrast, is used to determine an agent’s productivity.
- An agent works a 5 day week from 9am to 5pm
- They spend 30 hours per week working on tickets and other productive activities
- They have a 30 minute lunch break every day
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Agent utilization = (Productive Handling Time / Total Time) * 100%
Productive Handling Time = 30 hours
Total Time = 5 x 8 hrs = 40 hours
Agent utilization = (30 hours / 40 hours) * 100% = 75%
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Occupancy rate = (Productive Handling Time / Working Time)
Productive Handling Time = 30 hours
Working Time = 40 hours - (5 * 0.5 hrs) = 37.5 hours
Occupancy rate = 30 hours / 37.5 hours = 80%
Note that while a high occupancy rate is generally positive, it's important to avoid very high rates which can lead to agent burnout and reduced service quality. A balance should be struck to ensure both efficiency and quality of service. An industry best practice suggests an occupancy rate of 75-85% as a good target.
Now that you understand how occupancy is calculated, let’s look at why understanding your occupancy is useful.
Why understanding your occupancy is useful
As well as giving you an indicator of an agent’s productivity, understanding occupancy is useful in a number of ways.
- Who stands out and should be rewarded or recognized as a result
- Who has low productivity and may benefit from extra training and coaching
- Who is at risk of burnout and may need a break, or a redistribution of their workload
Understanding how agents are performing against one another:
- New hires against more experienced colleagues
- Office-based versus remote staff
- A business process outsourcer (BPO) versus an in-house team
Overall, this leads to a better workload distribution, improved agent efficiency, and a more highly skilled team. It also helps you make informed staffing decisions in terms of scheduling and building more accurate forecasts. Ultimately, this should provide your customers with an improved experience and lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.
Now that you know the value of understanding your occupancy, let’s look at how Zendesk makes it easy to visualize how your agents are spending their time.
Visualizing how your agents spend their time
As a CX leader, getting a clear breakdown of the activities your agents have been working on and any untracked time they had may have been difficult in the past. Now, this information is available on the Agent activity page in Zendesk WFM.
The example above shows how the agents in the Tier 1 team are spending their day. Agents begin their shifts at different times of day and then perform a number of different activities throughout their shift. The information is helpfully color-coded to make the same type of activities easily identifiable.
Let’s take a closer look at one of our agents, Cora:
Below her activity breakdown, you can see the activities she was scheduled to work on and her adherence to her schedule (requires a schedule to be defined), Talk states, and her productivity timeline. The productivity timeline shows key points in her day, indicated by the vertical blue lines, such as when she has been assigned a ticket, contributed to a ticket, or resolved a ticket.
The right hand side also shows a summary of how Cora has been spending her time during this time period, broken down into paid and unpaid time, and the breakdown of her productivity based on the point metrics indicated by the blue vertical lines.
As much as the Agent activity page is useful to quickly see the breakdown of how Cora is spending her day, it is often useful to be able to see the metrics behind this. You can do this by navigating to the historical Agent Activity system report template and searching for Cora:
This section looked at how CX leaders can visualize how agents are spending their time, but in order to do this you need to be able to track the activities your agents are performing. The next section describes how this is done.
Tracking the activities your agents are working on
- Handling multiple email, chat, voice, social media, and messaging tickets
- Attending meetings
- Taking breaks
- Going to lunch
- Coaching other members of the team
- Quality assurance
- Completing training
- Contributing to shared knowledge
There could also be more, or alternative tasks, depending on the nature of your business.
From the moment you install Zendesk WFM, all ticket handling activity is automatically tracked in the background (even if your agent switches between browser tabs). This approach ensures your agents do not have to waste time tracking and also ensures all activity is tracked accurately.
In the example above, the Zendesk WFM side bar app has automatically tracked this agent spending 14 seconds on ticket 39.
General tasks (non-ticket handling) can also be captured but need to be defined in your Zendesk WFM environment and tracked by your agents manually via the sidebar app, as there is no way to track these automatically.
When you define your general tasks, you can assign specific colors to them to make them more easily identifiable in the Agent activity page. You can make them available for all groups or specific groups, define whether they contribute to occupancy and productivity metrics, and also what status Talk should be set when these tasks are used.
General tasks excluded from occupancy are typically activities you don't pay for, such as lunch. However, general tasks marked as productive time, such as tasks equivalent to ticket handling time, could include quality assurance, training, coaching, and so on.
After these general tasks have been defined, agents can then select them manually from the Zendesk WFM app to have these activities tracked.
In the image, the agent has so far been on a break for 13 seconds.
This section described how agents can track their activity and how to customize their activities to meet the needs of your business. The next section describes how you can visualize the current status information of your agents.
Visualizing the current status of your agents
The Agent activity page discussed earlier provides a visual representation of the tasks your agents have been performing during the day. But what if you want a quick view on the current status of your agents, such as what activities they're currently performing? You an get this information on the Agent status page, along with the associated ticket number (where relevant) and the duration they have been performing this activity.
Note the activity they are performing is typically aligned to a particular workstream or a set of tickets that meet a specific condition. Example:
If you have a defined schedule, then you may also want to take a look at the adherence metrics which show whether the agent is doing what they are scheduled to be doing (in adherence) or something else (out of adherence) and how long they have been in that state.
Previous sections looked at how agent activity is tracked, how you can see the breakdown of these activities in the Agent activity page, and how you can see your agents current activity in the Agent status page. The next section looks at how you can visualize the amount of activity time logged by an agent.
Visualizing your agent attendance
The Agent attendance page shows the total time logged by your agents and the breakdown of activity time logged by your agents. This includes the amount of time spent on unpaid breaks, they have been late, left early or worked overtime as well as planned and unplanned time off and their occupancy rate.
If you have defined a schedule, then you will also be able to see whether your agents are currently scheduled to be working. A schedule is also needed for metrics such as late, left early, and overtime to be populated.
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Occupancy rate = (Productive Handling Time / Working Time) * 100 %
Productive Handling Time = Ticket handling time + General Tasks marked as Productive Time
Working Time = Total logged in time - General Tasks marked as Excluded from Occupancy
Summary
This article explained:
- The concept of occupancy and how to calculate occupancy rate - the proportion of working time spent on productive tasks
- How occupancy rate differs from agent utilization - occupancy rate is a measure of agent productivity in contrast to agent utilization, which is more of a measure of team capacity.
- How an understanding of occupancy can be used to improve the performance of your team by identifying agents who need rewarding or assistance and also comparing team performance
- How to visualize overall agent activity breakdown in Zendesk to see where agents are spending their time
- How all agent activities can be tracked accurately with minimal burden on your agents thanks to the Zendesk WFM app, and how the flexibility of general tasks makes it easy to customize this to the needs of the business
- How current agent status and agent attendance can be viewed along with your occupancy rate
An understanding of these concepts and access to these capabilities will help CX leaders get clear insight into how effectively their teams are working to deliver on the promise of improved customer experience and how and where they can make improvements.