Workforce Management for Small Call Centers

Why Workforce Management Matters (Especially for Small Teams)

For small call centers, workforce management (WFM) isn’t just about filling shifts. It’s about balancing customer expectations with limited resources. Unlike enterprise operations with hundreds of agents and big WFM departments, smaller teams often rely on Excel sheets, manual scheduling, or gut instinct. The result? Overstaffing, understaffing, or stressed agents trying to cover too much.

This guide breaks down the essentials of workforce management for small call centers—forecasting, scheduling, shrinkage, occupancy, and reporting—while showing how the right tools can save time and money.

What Is Workforce Management in a Call Center?

Workforce management (WFM) is the process of ensuring the right number of agents are available at the right time to meet customer demand. It typically covers:

• Forecasting: Predicting call, email, and chat volume.

• Staffing: Determining how many agents you need.

• Scheduling: Assigning shifts and breaks efficiently.

• Real-Time Management: Monitoring queues and adjusting.

• Reporting & Analysis: Reviewing performance, SLAs, and efficiency.

For small teams, each of these steps can make or break performance.

The Unique Challenges for Small Call Centers

Small and mid-sized call centers face problems enterprise teams don’t:

1. Limited Staff: One agent calling out can derail service levels.

2. Blended Roles: Agents often handle multiple channels (phone, email, chat).

3. Tight Budgets: Expensive enterprise WFM tools aren’t realistic.

4. Manual Processes: Many rely on spreadsheets that don’t scale.

5. Volatility: A single property launch, promo, or outage can spike volume.

That’s why having a structured WFM approach is even more critical when every seat counts.

Step 1: Forecasting Contact Volume

Forecasting is the foundation of WFM. Small call centers should:

• Use historical data: Calls per interval, emails per day, chat concurrency.

• Account for seasonality: Holidays, product launches, or billing cycles.

• Watch customer patience: Average abandon times help set realistic SLAs.

Pro tip: Even if you don’t have years of data, start collecting now. Your forecasts will improve over time.

Step 2: Calculating Staffing Needs

Once you have a forecast, the next challenge is figuring out how many agents you actually need. This is where queueing formulas like Erlang C come into play.

At a high level, Erlang C helps answer: “Given this many calls, average handle time, and service level goal, how many agents do we need to hit that target?”

Most workforce management software (including Spark Queue) leverages Erlang C—or variations of it—behind the scenes. That’s what makes it possible to turn raw volume data into practical staffing numbers without doing hours of manual math.

👉 Want the full breakdown of how Erlang C works, with examples? Check out our complete Erlang C guide. Speaking from experience, while you can try to do it manually without software, I highly encourage looking into Spark Queue to get this done easily.

Step 3: Layering Shrinkage & Occupancy

Even once you’ve calculated base staffing needs, there are two realities you need to account for:

• Shrinkage: the portion of time agents are unavailable (PTO, breaks, absenteeism, training). In small call centers, shrinkage often runs between 25%–35%. That means if Erlang says you need 10 people logged in, you’ll likely need closer to 13 scheduled. Here’s a guide on calculating shrinkage for your team.

• Occupancy: how “busy” agents are during logged-in time. A healthy target is usually 80–85%. Below that, agents are underutilized; above that, they burn out. While Erlang outputs a theoretical staffing level, you should always check how it translates into occupancy for your team’s workload. Here is another guide for you!

This step is where WFM becomes more art than science—balancing mathematical formulas with human realities.

Step 4: Scheduling Agents

Now that you have your number of agents (thanks Erlang!), scheduling is going to be more than plugging names into shifts. For smaller teams, best practices include:

• Stagger breaks/lunches so coverage stays balanced.

• Layer in part-time or flexible shifts to handle peak hours.

• Account for agent skills (billing vs tech support vs sales).

Without good scheduling, even the right forecast won’t save your SLAs.

Why Spreadsheets Aren’t Enough

You may take all of this information and begin building scheduling spreadsheets to help you organize your staffing and plan for who you need when. You may also an hour later be ready to toss the computer out of the window (or maybe that was just me..). Spreadsheets are a common starting point—but they have limits:

• Hard to maintain as complexity grows

• No automation for scheduling or forecasting

• Difficult to share and collaborate on

• Easy to break formulas, leading to inaccurate staffing

• Doesn't account for real-world scenarios like agents handling multiple queues

For lean teams, the risk of errors often outweighs the cost savings. You'll burn any "savings" in productivity alone with the time you spent on upkeep and service levels you can't hit because "it just doesn't add up".

Tools Designed for Small Call Centers

Most WFM software is built (and priced) for enterprises. Small call centers are left with two bad options: stick with Excel or overspend on tools designed for 1,000+ seats.

That’s why purpose-built solutions are becoming essential—affordable, flexible, and tailored to teams with under 100 agents.

Spark Queue: Built for the “Forgotten Teams”

This is where Spark Queue comes in. Spark Queue was built specifically for small to mid-sized contact centers that need more than spreadsheets but don’t want enterprise complexity.

With Spark Queue, you can:

• Input your forecasted volume with simple, intuitive inputs.

• Leverage critical component such as shrinkage and occupancy with ease.

• Instantly calculate staffing needs across channels (even if agents handle multiple queues!).

• Build agent schedules with smart break/lunch logic.

Instead of wrestling with formulas or expensive enterprise platforms, Spark Queue gives lean teams the power of WFM—without the bloat.

👉 Try it for yourself!