How to Calculate ‘Not Ready’ Rate

Steve Rongevær-Boother, Sales Engineer at Calabrio, explains how contact centres can calculate not ready rate and the formula required.

Calculating Contact Centre Not Ready Rate

Put simply, the Not Ready Rate is a measurement of the time that the contact centre agent spends on tasks or activities which do not relate to their readiness to take interactions from one or more channels that they’re skilled to take interactions for.

The agent’s time spent in non-ready status is divided by the total amount of available time that they have during that shift. The result gives the not ready time percentage.

So if, for example, the agent is ready for 7 hours, but is logged onto the contact centre platform for a total of 8 hours, this will result in a not ready time rate of 12.5%.

It is possible for multiple statuses to count towards a ready rate. For example, an agent working on inbound and outbound inquiries will be deemed ready if they’re working on either of these statuses.

Post-call or after-call work can also count towards this figure, though managers should check this at regular intervals, to ensure that after-call statuses are not being mismanaged or abused by agents.

Taking that as an example, if an agent is logged on for 8 hours, ready for 5 of those, and working outbound inquiries for 1 hour, as well as spending 1 hour in after-call work activities, for example to write up case notes, they would be ready overall for seven of the eight hours they’re logged on for, so a not ready rate of 12.5%.

One thing to bear in mind is that the not ready rate is not the same as agent adherence. Agent adherence is a measure of the matching of activities, or statuses, which the agent has in their scheduled activities from their WFM system, to the activities from the contact centre phone system, and ensuring a match between the two to maintain their adherence level.

Where the agent matches the status to the published schedule, their adherence score will increase. Where the agent does not match, their adherence score will decrease.

Again, in this situation, where an agent knows that their adherence is incorrect, they should approach their manager and make an adjustment, especially if their activities have changed.

Agents will where possible use their WFM reports to measure their not ready rate, as well as their adherence scores. It’s therefore important to understand the difference between not ready rate and the adherence rate.

With thanks to Steve Rongevær-Boother, Sales Engineer, Calabrio, for contributing to this video.

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