Importance of Calculator

As a call centre team manager, or a call centre head, an Erlang calculator should be your best friend. It can be the most handy tool to help you forecast and report multiple metrics, numbers to your executive team and also plan your call center operations better. As we all know, call centre is one of the busiest and most important customer facing functions in a company, it is important to plan it well from all aspects – staffing, quality, forecasting and more. Research says that one of the most high priority goals of executives is to reduce the inbound calls to a call centre and improve call centre operations, quality. To achieve such goals, an Erlang calculator is a must.

So what can an Erlang calculator do for call centre executives?

An Erlang calculator can help with multiple things like estimate how many lines you need in your trunk groups if you know that traffic that will be offered to your system, or estimate how many agents or operators you need to answer calls at your inbound call center or help desk. But the Erlang calculator is not just limited to these. Let’s take a look at the different types of calculators in the next section. Types of Erlang Calculators While the most commonly used Erlang calculators are Erlang C (staffing calculator) and Erlang B (number of lines needed), in this section we are going to talk about types of Erlang Calculators and what each of them can do for your call centre. They are based on the industry-standard Erlang traffic models, established in the first half of the last century to analyse telecommunications systems.

• Erlang B calculator Estimate how many lines you need in your trunk groups if you know that traffic that will be offered to your system.

• Erlang C calculator Estimate how many agents or operators you need to answer calls at your inbound call center or help desk.

• Call center calculator Combining Erlang B and Erlang C, this calculator estimates how many agents and lines you need at your call center over a five hour period.

• Call minutes calculator Estimate how many lines your telecom system needs if know the daily minutes it must switch.

• VoIP bandwidth calculator Calculate the bandwidth you require to transport a fixed number of voice paths through your IP network.

• Erlang bandwidth calculator Estimate how much bandwidth you need to carry your busy hour traffic in Erlangs.

• Extended Erlang B Similar to Erlang B but takes into account that a percentage of calls are immediately repeated if they are blocked.

• Engset calculator Estimate how many lines your trunk groups need when you have a finite number of traffic source.

  Glossary

  Abandoned – the percentage of callers who will abandon after a given time.

  Agents – calculate the number of agents required to achieve a SLA target.

  AgentsASA – calculate the number of agents required to achieve an ASA target.

  Average Speed to Answer (ASA) – the average time taken to connect to an agent.

  Call Capacity – the maximum number of calls that can be handled.

  Fractional Agents – calculate the number of notional agents required to achieve a SLA target.

  Fractional Call Capacity – the maximum number of calls that can be handled.

  Queued – the percentage of calls which will be queued.

  Queue Size – average number of calls queuing.

  Queue Time – the average waiting time for those calls which are not answered immediately.

  SLA – the actual percentage of calls answered within the target time.

  Service Time – the time within which a certain percentage of calls will be answered.

  Trunks – the number of telephone trunks required for a given call load.

  Utilisation – percentage of agent’s time spent on the telephone.