Occupancy is one of those tried and true measures of how efficient a contact center is.  It essentially measures how “occupied” agents are with customer work and includes the time they spend on customer interactions and any after-contact work (ACW.)  Occupancy is the opposite of available time so the longer an agent sits in available, the less occupied they are and the lower their overall occupancy will be.    

Many contact centers use occupancy to measure the effectiveness of their workforce management teams as it gives a good picture of how efficient your schedules are (depending on forecast accuracy) and how well you are managing over/understaffing in [...]

“On the Folly of Rewarding A While Hoping for B” was written by Steven Kerr in 1995 and published by The Academy of Management Executive. It is posted on the Internet under the rubric of business classic, although the topic is equally relevant in our personal lives. (Parents, listen up!) The author describes the practice of building a reward system that reinforces one behavior, while managers (or parents) are secretly hoping for something else. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that human behavior being what it is, we tend to gravitate to what’s actually being rewarded. The article is a cautionary tale on the [...]