Staffing outbound is usually done by feel and budget. It can be calculated, and the calculation is worth doing because it typically reveals that a target everyone has agreed to requires two or three times the calling actually happening.
Work backwards from contracts
- Contracts wanted per month
- Multiply by qualified appointments needed per contract: use your own historical number
- Multiply by qualifying conversations per appointment
- Multiply by dials per conversation on your list quality
- You now have dials required per month
- Divide by the dials one caller reliably produces per day, then by working days
Every number in that chain should come from your own data. Borrowed ratios produce a confident answer about somebody else business, particularly the dials-per-conversation figure, which varies by more than a factor of three depending on list quality.
Be honest about caller output
On a power or predictive dialer, a focused caller on a full shift produces a few hundred dials a day. Use a realistic figure rather than a best day, and account for the fact that no caller works every scheduled day, holidays, sickness and attrition mean planned capacity and actual capacity differ by a noticeable margin over a quarter.
If you plan at 100% attendance you will be under-staffed permanently.
The three constraints that cap the answer
The calculation gives you a number of callers. Three things decide whether hiring that many will actually work:
- Data: do you have enough clean, well-segmented records to feed them? Adding callers to a thin list simply increases the rate at which you burn it, and contact rates fall
- Closing capacity: can somebody work the leads within a day? If not, more calling produces more decayed leads rather than more contracts
- Management, who reviews the calls? One person can supervise a handful of callers properly; beyond that you need a team leader, and that is a real cost the calculation does not include
Any one of these being the binding constraint means adding callers reduces your cost efficiency rather than improving it. Most operations that scaled calling and saw no improvement had a data or closing constraint they did not diagnose.
Start with one, measure, then scale
The correct first move is almost always a single full-time caller worked properly for a month, because it produces your actual ratios. A month of one caller gives you the dials-per-conversation and conversations-per-appointment figures for your specific list, at which point the staffing calculation stops being guesswork.
Scaling before you have those numbers means you are multiplying an unknown.
Part-time and split shifts
Two callers on half shifts generally underperform one on a full shift, because calling has a warm-up and the strongest contact window sits at one end of the day. Where split shifts do work is time zone coverage. A shift aimed at eastern evenings and another at western evenings is two good windows rather than one good and one poor.
Reviewing the number
Recalculate quarterly. Ratios shift as list sources change, as callers improve, and as the market moves. A staffing number that was right in January is frequently wrong by June, usually in the direction of needing more calling than expected because the easiest records in a list get worked first.