Chat Operations Capacity Planning

Chat Operations Capacity Planning

Can someone help with the calculation required to get to handling capacity of a team of chat reps based on the following parameters:

AHT: 16.5 mins

Concurrency: 2 chats

Utilization: 160%

Basically, I’m looking to find out how many chats a group of people can handle per hour based on the above parameters. What other data should I look into? Thanks for the help!

Question asked by Gnaneswar

Answer for Chat Operations Capacity Planning

There is no easy formula for web chat that I know of.

The two options you have are

1. Erlang calculations – but these are designed to have a concurrency of 1.

2. Some form of simulation – which requires quite a an extensive amount of coding. This though is often built into many WFM systems.

3. Observation of demand vs agents available in the centre

What many people do is to work on a form of guestimate based on Erlang. If you work out how many agents you need if it was phone calls with a concurrency of 1. Then you can apply some form of “fudge factor”. This will be a number somewhere between a concurrency of 1 and 2, since there will be occasions when an agent is only handling 1 chat, but is able to take 2. I am guessing that what you are calling 160% utilisation is this factor which is the same as 1.6 – ie the average number of web chats that an agent actually handles.

So pumping the results into our call centre calculator

https://www.callcentretools.com/tools/erlang-calculator/

Incoming Calls 100

in a period of 60 Minutes

Average Handling Time (AHT) 990 Seconds

Required Service Level 80 % Answered in

Target Answer Time 60 Seconds

Shrinkage 35% Percent

This gives a base answer of 51 agents.

If you then divide this by 1.6 (to match your 160% utilisation) you come out with 32 Agents needed.

The result is not as good as a simulation but provides a reasonable starting point.

With thanks to Jonty