How Many Customer Service Agents Do I Need? Let’s Look at the Numbers
So you have started to offer customer support to your users.
You are now ready to build a dedicated team of customer support agents to assist your users.
But how do you manage your resources correctly and make sure that you’re hiring enough staff?
To figure out how many customer service agents you need, you'll have to calculate a few things:
- Your Customer Base Numbers and Projections
- Your average monthly tickets
- Your tickets per agent per month
- Calculate the number by using the formula
The formula to calculate how many customer service agents you need is:
Total monthly tickets / (tickets/rep/month)
We are Moment, and we’ll break it all down for you
Customer Support Metrics and KPI
Before you think about additional hiring, you have to make sure you’ve got your numbers right.
Customer Support KPIs are incredibly important, as they give you an accurate view of your customer support operations.
Ideally, you’d want to track some basic metrics such as number of issues, average response times, average resolution time and customer satisfaction metrics.
This might sound overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, we’ve put together a guide on which Customer Support KPI’s you should be tracking.
How Many Customer Service Agents Do You Need
Now, let’s keep going with more talk about numbers.
Here are the calculations you will need to make to figure out how many customer service agents you need in your team.
1. Calculate Your Customer Base Numbers and Projections
First, you will need to understand the context of your customer base. Make sure that you can answer the following questions.
- What is the current size of your customer base?
- On average, at what rate does your customer base grow month over month?
- Are there any factors that could affect the growth rate of your customer base in the foreseeable future? (Marketing Campaigns, New Products, etc.)
These answers will help you assess the rate at which your customer base grows and how you could accommodate for it.
2. Calculate your average monthly tickets
With your customer base numbers in mind, it’s time to now calculate the average number of tickets your team receives per month.
The goal here is to calculate how this number relates to the number of tickets your team receives per month.
For example, you might run this analysis for the last 36 months and calculate that for every 5 new customers, your team receives 1 new support ticket every month.
You can then use your customer growth projections from earlier to estimate the growth rate of support tickets for your business.
3. Calculate your tickets per agent per month
Now, if you have any historical data from your existing support operations, here’s where it comes into play.
At this point, you’d have to calculate the number of support tickets that each current agent can resolve per month. Sounds easy enough right?
However, this number is surrounded by critical context.
While in an ideal world, you might want this number to be as high as humanly possible, the truth is that this number can drastically affect customer satisfaction.
If your reps can tackle 5,000 tickets every month but your customer satisfaction scores are in the dump, then you might see where the problem lies.
Make sure that your reps are working at a rate where customer satisfaction is still positive. This might mean your tickets per agent per month could be cut by half or more!
4. Calculate the number by using the formula
Now that you have made your calculations, it’s time to run the numbers.
The basic formula to calculate how many customer service agents you need look like this:
Total monthly tickets / (tickets/rep/month)
The result of this formula will tell you how many customer support representatives your team should have.
However, remember that the two numbers you’re punching into the formula exist within critical context. These being your customer base growth and customer satisfaction score.
Additionally, you’ll have to account for other factors such as training time for new recruits, vacation time, sick days, holidays, etc.
However, the formula above should give you a good place to start.
Closing Thoughts
Now that you know how to calculate the number of customer support reps that you need, you’ll be ready to start your hiring process.
In fact, we’ve put together a guide on what you should ask while interviewing Customer Support representatives.