A desk taking 120 calls a day across eight hours averages fifteen an hour. Staff for fifteen an hour and you will have a queue every morning and idle agents every afternoon.
Calls do not arrive on average. They arrive in a shape.
The shape
Almost every Kenyan business-hours desk looks broadly like this:
- 8am — quiet. People are travelling.
- 10am to noon — the peak. Often a quarter of the day in two hours.
- 1pm — a dip, as customers go to lunch. Your agents want to go at the same time.
- 3pm to 5pm — a second, smaller rise. Things people meant to do this morning.
- After 5pm — falls away quickly.
Yours will differ in detail. A clinic peaks early. A retailer peaks after work. A SACCO looks normal for twenty-five days and then does something else entirely at month end.
The detail matters, which is why you measure rather than assume.
Finding yours
If you have a call centre system, this is a report: calls by hour of day, averaged over a month, with the days of the week separated. Look at it once and the staffing conversation changes permanently.
If you are still on mobile phones, you can approximate it from call logs, but you will be missing the calls that never connected — which are concentrated in exactly the hour you are trying to find. Expect the real peak to be sharper than your data suggests.
What to do about the peak
Four options, roughly in order of cost.
1. Remove calls from it. The cheapest answer. If a quarter of your mid-morning calls are “has my order shipped”, send an SMS when it ships. The call stops happening. A menu that handles the two commonest questions does the same thing.
2. Move calls out of it. Offer a callback when the wait goes over a minute. The caller keeps their place, hangs up, and the system rings them at twenty past eleven when there is room. You have moved work from the peak into the trough without hiring anyone.
3. Move people into it. Stagger lunch so nobody is away at eleven. Have somebody outside the team — a supervisor, someone in accounts — trained and logged in as an overflow for two hours a day. This costs almost nothing and is the most under-used option in small desks.
4. Hire. Sometimes correct, and the right answer when the peak has grown permanently. But do it after the first three, not before, or you will hire to cover a problem that an SMS would have solved.
The month-end case
Some businesses do not have a busy hour so much as a busy week.
SACCOs, microfinance lenders, anyone whose customers are paid monthly: the last three and first three days of the month can carry several times normal volume. Staffing for that all year is unaffordable; being overwhelmed six days a month is unacceptable.
The answer is almost always a combination — a menu that answers balance questions without a person, callbacks offered aggressively during the spike, and a small amount of planned overtime on known dates. The full version of that argument is here.
Check it again in three months
Call patterns move. A new product, a campaign, a competitor’s outage, a change in when you send statements — any of these reshape the day.
The peak you staffed for in January is not necessarily the peak you have in April. Look at the report quarterly. It takes ten minutes and it is the single most useful thing in the reporting pack.
The arithmetic for headcount is here, and the numbers worth watching weekly are here.