Being a Team Leader, the ratio usually is at 1:12 or even 1:15 for some centers. Can you imagine your supervisor handling 15 people and have to constantly monitor and coach to tons of metrics? More often supervisors are expected to summarize their team’s performance, having most of their time generating reports on a weekly basis. They spend hours on end to meet coaching schedules, team meetings, additional training plus generating reports. The biggest excuse for not coaching their agent s would be the latter.

You can’t do away with reports so what does a team leader have to do?
If there isn’t anyone in the team or account who can do the reports, then creating a reporting template that will shoe a snapshot of your team’s stats would be beneficial. You can create it in Microsoft Excel for each agent and do a summary. There are reporting tools that can also automate this for you. Once done, all you have to do is input the data, either daily or weekly. This will only take you a few minutes of your time.

A visual representation of your agent’s KPIs is key, for you to be on top of your game plan to improve performance. All you have to do is open the file, look at the graphs and you will know who to focus on for the week.

1:15 is the recommended ration, if you look at benchmark reports you will find that practice will vary across countries and industry sectors. Best practice is closer to 1:8 (no more than 1:12), with allowances for the experience of both supervisors and team members and the organizations quality structure (i.e., is their separate group for call quality recording and feedback and how does this interact with the team leader)?. If the ration is too great the team is unlikely to be getting the coaching necessary for continuous improvement. In addition if a TL has 100% of his time dedicated to leading the team you could probably do 1:15 but you will get dragged into projects and other distractions.

So you need to factor those distracting factors in if you really want to set a base figure. For call centers (ranging 50-75 agents), team of 7-12 is always very effective. By effective mean to give proper attention to them, solving their issues and simultaneously achieving KPIs of call center.

Ratio:

• 1 National Manager Call Centre Operations : 3 or more call centre sites
• 1 Call Centre Manager: 8 – 10 Direct Reports
• 1 Team Manager : 8 – 10 Team Leaders
• 1 Team Leader : 12 – 14 CSRs (Service)
• 1 Team Leader : 8 CSRs (Sales)
• 1 Team Leader: 1 Team Coach : 20 CSRs
• 1 Call and Resource Manager : 3 or more call centre sites (80+ CSRs per site)
• 1 Call and Resource Planner : 3 Schedule Administrators or 100 CSRs
• 1 Schedule Administrator : 150 CSRs or 3 queues
  (if number of queues increases then ratio of staff decreases)
• 1 Learning and Development Consultant : 50 CSRs
• 1 Learning and Development Manager : 10 Learning and Development Consultants

If you are in a contact center which is very transactional based then the role may be more basic, general coaching, review of stats/KPI’s and attendance monitoring. But if you are in a more customer experience, case management environment then coaching requirements are much more depth, call handling, case handling, objective outcomes, impact on creating brand ambassadors. Much better to have a Lead Coach to support the team and the ream leader but also a lesser team size.

Number of agents will differ per team according to Call Center Size. Twelve agents is a good number to work with as a team building can be done in a proper manner. Team leaders always get overloaded with other work and then they lose focus regarding targets to be reached.

This shows that the average is typically a ratio of 1:15. It also shows that the top performers all have between 8-15 agents per coach. This results in:

• 10 % higher ready time
• 5% higher availability
• 5% higher FCR
• Lower absence