How many customer service agents do you need?

Whether you’re currently deciding if you need an in-house or outsourced team to supply your customer support needs or working on the hiring process right now, you inevitably ask yourself how many agents you need. While we understand the uncertainty behind it, we want to urge you to take your time in determining what your right headcount is.

There is no magic formula that will answer that question because every company has different needs, so it would be useless to calculate it the same way for everyone. Instead, you need to be asking yourself what data you have available to share and work on analyzing it to obtain an accurate number of support agents based on your needs.

In this article, we will be sharing what factors influence your ideal team size, the importance of getting the headcount right, best practices, and how to correctly forecast for a sustainable team that supports growth.

The Importance of Hiring the Right Headcount

Impact on CX

When hiring your support team, you need to make sure you are hiring the right number of agents; if not, your customers will not hesitate to show their discomfort. A well-thought-out team leverages quality with efficiency, improving your existing metrics (response times, service quality, customer satisfaction, or net promoter score). An understaffed team will suffer from high volumes and a long backlog, eroding customers’ trust. 

Around 73% of consumers say they will switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences, and more than half will switch after just one.

Business efficiency and cost control

Overstaffing inflates costs without improving outcomes. Understaffing drives overtime, rework, and repeat contacts, which are often more expensive than planned capacity.

Both understaffing and overstaffing will have an impact on your costs, hurting your revenue. Overstaffing will improve your costs without improving the results, as your agents will have a lot of free time if the volume of requests doesn’t match the number of support people. Understaffing will hurt your current outcomes and metrics in a way that your customers will feel unsatisfied with the quality they receive. 

Either way, you need to understand and collaborate with your hiring team or outsourced partner to determine the exact number of agents that will satisfy your needs.

Employee workload, retention, and morale

Around 77% of agents report that their workload and the complexity of issues have increased compared to a year ago, and 56% report experiencing burnout. If you are not considering your current workload to determine hiring needs, you risk suffering from employee burnout and drops in service quality. 

Scalability as the business grows

A majority of business leaders (57%) expect customer-service volumes to increase by up to 20% over the next one to two years. Your business needs to consider its current volume and needs and plan ahead by estimating its potential growth. This way, you ensure a smooth scaling strategy that allows you to grow without sacrificing your customer experience.

You must find a balance between the right number of team members while allowing yourself to have space for future hiring needs.  

A Simpler Way to Approach Staffing Calculations

If you look for staffing calculators, then you may find several that use their own personalized formulas to calculate the right number of support agents based on your needs. While those are great if you have no idea where to start, the reality is that there is no simple formula that will determine the right number of agents, as there are a lot of variables to consider. 

But, if you really need a headstart, then this is a basic formula used by many support leaders:

Daily support volume × average handling time ÷ available support hours

The problem with the formula is that it is not accurate for everything you must evaluate while determining your staffing needs. While your current volume and handle times provide basic information to begin with, it is an oversimplification. Staffing needs are personalized to each company based on its goals, budget, availability, and expectations.

Asking how to calculate staffing needs is not enough; you need to translate the data into insights that provide a better understanding of your staffing needs. Those insights are later transformed into an operational and sustainable team with enough capacity handle current volume and to adapt to future scaling needs. 

The final decision must be made between the customer and the hiring team. If the customer wants an in-house team, then their talent acquisition team must work with a representative who understands the current needs. If the company wants an outsourced team, then a company representative must inform the outsourced partner what they need and be an active part of the process.

The Core Factors That Determine Support Staffing Needs

Volume of Incoming Requests

The core beyond every successful hiring strategy is to understand how and when volume rates change. Understanding your current seasonal peaks will help determine when you need to start planning for scaling your team. Knowing where it comes from will determine the number of channels your support strategy needs, the language(s) you need, or the time zones you must consider. Key considerations include:

• Total number of tickets, calls, or messages per time period
• Channel breakdown across email, phone, chat, and social
• Peak periods versus average load
• Perceived quality and brand protection 
• Unexpected spikes tied to promotions, launches, or outages

Evaluating your volume is not enough, as volume is not the same as complexity, and if you were considering volume only, you’d only be creating a skill gap that will affect your customer support’s perception and satisfaction.

Complexity of Support Tasks

Every request comes with its own level of complexity, so it's a common mistake to plan only for repetitive inquiries and forget about complex cases. As your business grows, you must take into account the potential increase in complexity, which will determine the skills and time you need for them. Staffing must account for:

• Simple versus complex issues
• Tiered support structures (Tier 1, Tier 2, specialized teams)
• Variability in average handling time

You must also consider the right channels based on the type of requests you are getting and would potentially get. Demand complexity won’t always stay the same; collaborating with the hiring team is key to defining your “perfect” agent and how many members your team needs. Analyzing volume and complexity will tell you the specific skills, but well-defined skills are not enough if you fail at defining your team’s operating hours. 

Operating Hours and Coverage Model

Your needed coverage changes depending on the time zones you cover or the countries where you operate. Taking coverage into consideration is a must when defining your hiring needs, so evaluate the following factors:

• 8×5 support (Normal weekdays and operating hours)
• Extended hours or after hours
• Full 24/7 coverage

Workforce forecasting becomes multi-horizon, spanning short-term schedules, medium-term hiring, and long-term capacity planning. The operating days per week and whether 24/7 coverage is required are often the biggest structural drivers of headcount. Now you also need to evaluate the specific channels your support strategy must include. 

Support Channels and Tooling

Every customer support channel requires different skills and has different outcomes, so strategically defining which ones you need is key before the hiring process begins. Factors to consider include:

• Channel expectations and pressure
• Self-service options (knowledge base, bots)
• Automation that reduces repetitive tasks

Your needs will define the right channels for you. Having a previous understanding of the agent skills, coverage, and the level of complexity the inquiries have will determine the channels that will help you obtain your desired outcomes. Failing to define the right channels will have a negative effect on revenue, satisfaction, perception, and response times.

Business Growth and Seasonality

Simple staffing formulas won’t take into consideration your growth goals and seasonality needs, which play a key role in the hiring process. Accurate forecasting and scenario planning are critical for:

• Anticipated growth
• Seasonal spikes such as holidays
• Product launches and marketing campaigns

62% of CX leaders feel behind in delivering the instant experiences customers expect. Which implies staffing decisions must anticipate growth, not chase it. The entire mix of skills, complexity, channels, coverage, and growth expectations will provide a better understanding of how many agents you need.

The Real Capacity of a Support Operation

Realistically, in a standard 8-hour shift, the agent won’t be able to cover the entirety of those 8 hours. When your business has well-run operations, this means you’ll see about 5.5 to 6.5 hours of active support time once natural constraints are considered. These include:

• Training and refresher sessions
• Product, policy, and system updates
• Product launches and marketing campaigns
• Team meetings, one-on-ones, QA feedback, and calibration
• Occasional system or tooling issues
• Breaks

These activities are not meaningless, so you shouldn’t remove them, but even though they may produce drawbacks in operating hours, they are way more meaningful than those “lost” couple of minutes. Take training and product updates as an example, they are meant to enhance your agents’ productivity, improving their service quality. 

If you put too much pressure on your agents to do shifts as close to 8 hours as possible, you’ll then be creating a hostile environment. Early warning signs of imbalance include burnout, idle time, missed SLAs, long queues, and declining quality. These symptoms point back to forecasting and staffing gaps, not individual performance issues.

Is Adding More Agents the Solution?

You’ve probably wondered if the solution to your problems is adding more people to the team. Like, it makes sense because you are seeing an increase in volume, so the most logical path will be to hire more people, right? Well, not really, not every case is as simple as that. Common signs that tell you adding more headcount is not the solution include:

• Service levels failing to improve despite increased headcount
• Rising AHT and repeat contacts
• Agents blocked by approvals, unclear processes, or poor tools

These results signal internal issues, so when your operations are not running smoothly, throwing more people into the mix will just bring you more issues. Evaluate your process design, routing, tooling, or previous hiring decisions. 

When your staffing and forecasts are on point, but the performance is struggling, then that’s a sign that a process or tool is the issue. So, evaluate your internal processes and workflows before jumping into hiring. If your customer satisfaction and handling volume are too much for your current team, then it is logical to start planning for new hires. 

Forecasting for Growth and Seasonality

Importance of early planning

Ramp-up planning must start early as a collaborative strategy between the company and the hiring team (in-house or outsourced). All departments must have a say when it comes to forecasting, if you want to ensure accurate growth data. Starting early is the best way to have everything prepared on time, allowing for a smooth process. 

Your goal is to have everything set so when volumes start increasing, you already have your solution running. 

Why last-minute hiring fails

If you don’t plan with enough time, then everything will become a last-minute effort, shifting priorities and wasting valuable time for everyone. If you start your hiring process after the volume increases, then you’ll be rushing recruiting and training just to launch a “life-saver” team, increasing costs and risks, putting quality at risk.

Ramp-up as a strategic decision

Hiring new people must be seen as a strategic decision, not as the solution to every problem. After forecasting, teams must assess capacity levels to understand when it is necessary to start hiring. 

Best Practices for Making the Right Staffing Decisions 

Using Workforce Management Tools

Your company can rely on joint efforts between humans and technology to find the right balance for each need. Tools that specialize in workforce tasks can help your team define your needs to make the following decisions:

• Interval-level forecasting
• Heat maps showing when volume arrives
• Channel-specific models
• Ongoing comparison of forecasts to actuals

Flexible, Cross-Trained Teams

A great option to make your life easier when it comes to hiring new support agents is to hire those who have flexible availability and have a variety of experiences. Hiring cross-trained people allows for an efficient strategy because agents have been previously trained or have experience that makes it easier for them to shift between channels, languages, or roles when needed.

Regular staffing reassessment as the business evolves

Once you’ve hired the team, the work is not over yet; you need to keep evaluating performance through feedback and tracking metrics that will allow you to optimize the team. Continuous improvement is what makes companies stand out, so we encourage you to be on the lookout for opportunities to improve.

Customer-obsessed organizations that invest deliberately in experience and service capabilities grow revenue 41% faster, profits 49% faster, and retain customers 51% better than their peers. Answering yourself: how many customer service agents do I need is not just an operational question. It is a strategic one that directly shapes growth, retention, and long-term competitiveness.

Hiring the right number of people for each case

So the key to a successful strategy is to be patient and understand that each case has its own needs. You need to adapt and work each case differently; if not, you are failing from the beginning. Each case has its own set of aspects and challenges to consider, so preparing ahead of time will save your life. 

Hiring more people is not always the solution; you must first understand how your internal processes and workflows are performing to make a decision. Sometimes your internal issues are the cause of poor performance, not a lack of talent or understaffed teams. 

At Horatio, we understand that each customer comes with different issues and challenges, which is why our personalized approach guides the process. We don’t rush into hiring before collaborating with you to create the best roadmap to follow. Contact us and let’s work together on finding the right team and the accurate number of people for your support team.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Ditch the "Magic Formula": While the basic equations offer a starting point, they are oversimplifications. True staffing needs are personalized based on your specific growth goals, budget, and the unique complexity of your customer inquiries.
2. Prioritize "Real" Capacity: An 8-hour shift does not equal 8 hours of support. Account for shrinkage, training, breaks, and meetings, which typically leave agents with 5.5 to 6.5 hours of active time. Ignoring this leads to burnout and missed SLAs.
3. Balance CX with Cost Control: Understaffing erodes customer trust (73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after a few bad experiences), while overstaffing leads to "skill atrophy" and drained revenue. The goal is healthy occupancy, maximizing productivity without sacrificing quality.
4. More Agents Aren't Always the Answer: If performance is struggling despite a high headcount, the issue is likely internal. Before hiring more people, evaluate your tooling, routing, and process design to ensure your current team isn't being blocked by inefficient workflows.
5. Proactive Forecasting is Vital: Staffing decisions must anticipate growth, not chase it. Last-minute "life-saver" hiring often leads to rushed training and high costs. Use Workforce Management (WFM) tools and cross-training to create a flexible team that can handle seasonal spikes.

FAQs

1. How many customer service agents do I need?

The right headcount depends on volume by channel, hours of operation, service-level expectations, issue complexity, and how demand fluctuates over time. We work closely with each client to establish individual staffing needs, which starts with data, using judgment, forecasting, and operational context to turn that data into a sustainable plan.

1. What information is most important when estimating staffing needs?

The most critical inputs are current headcount and whether it feels over- or under-staffed, average daily volume, supported channels, days of operation, and whether 24/7 coverage is required.

1. How much “extra” capacity should teams plan for?

Well-run operations account for unexpected spikes, absences, and variability, but this is handled through disciplined planning. The goal is resilience, not excess. Capacity planning balances cost control with the ability to absorb volatility without breaking service levels or burning out teams.

1. How do skills factor into staffing decisions?

Skill requirements are defined at hiring based on channel, language, and complexity needs, but staffing effectiveness depends on ongoing skill management. We provide ongoing training and cross-skilling to be able to shift agents between channels and queues as demand changes to keep capacity aligned with real-time needs.

1. When does adding more agents stop helping?

If service levels don’t improve after headcount increases, staffing is usually not the root problem. Rising handle times, repeat contacts, and agents waiting on approvals are signs of process, routing, or tooling issues. Adding people in these cases increases cost without improving outcomes.

1. How often should staffing models be revisited?

Staffing is not a one-time decision. As volumes, channels, tools, and customer expectations evolve, staffing models should be reviewed regularly.