Seat Utilization Ratio

Seat Utilization Ratio

I’m looking for seat utilization ratios for call centers. Can you give me a hint where to find it?

Question asked by Joseph

Seat Utilization Formula

It all depends on how many staff you have and the number of productive seats available.

Seat Utilization (%) = Total Number of Agents (FTE) ÷ Number of Production Seats

For Example, if you have 210 agents and 120 seats the formula would be:

Seat Utilization = 210 agents/120 seats = 210/120 = 175%

With thanks to Koshy Mathew

Seat Utilization

As per BPO standard we use 1.7 as standard seat utilization ratio. Now question is how we reach to this number, we divide 24 by total number of hours wherein most of the seats were full.

So let’s suppose you have 24/7 call center but you will not get calls on all the desk in all the interval. In call center customers start calling around 8am and then until 10 pm (this can be changed based on your timezone, I am taking Indian call center’s example here).

Total peak window is 14 hours and if your divide your available hours i.e 24 with 14 your will get the result 1.7 seat ratio. I may be wrong and if anyone have any other calculation they can share with all of us.

With thanks to gurpreet

If you are looking for more formulas to calculate common contact centre stats, read these next:

• What is Call Centre Shrinkage and How to Calculate It?
• How to Calculate Required FTE for Inbound Call Volumes
• How to Calculate Contact Centre Service Level

Author: Jonty Pearce
Reviewed by: Hannah Swankie