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When to hire your next support agent: a practical way to tell

Hiring too early wastes money, and hiring too late burns out the people you have. You can tell which you are facing with a few numbers and a calculator.

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The signs

Any of these over several weeks, not one bad Monday:

  • The backlog grows week after week.
  • First response time rises, or you are missing targets you used to meet.
  • The oldest open ticket is weeks old.
  • Agents answer the easy ones first and the hard ones wait.
  • People work through lunch, or the same person is always the one catching up.

Work out the number

For email, divide the tickets per day by what one agent can close in a productive day (time per ticket, times productive hours), and add shrinkage for meetings, breaks and time off. For chat, use Erlang C, which accounts for contacts arriving at random. The staffing calculator does both.

Check the backlog math

If you close fewer tickets than arrive, no effort clears the backlog. The backlog calculator shows how many days it takes at your current pace, or the pace you need to clear it in a set time.

Try these first

They are cheaper than a salary, and some are quick:

  • Write macros for the five most repeated answers.
  • Write help center articles for the top repeat questions and link to them.
  • Auto-close tickets that have been waiting on the customer for a week.
  • Let an AI answer the routine questions, after testing it on your own tickets.
  • Look for tickets that should not exist: a confusing screen or email that generates the same question each week.

When it is time

If you have done the above and the numbers still say the team is short, hire. Use the cost per ticket calculator to see what an agent costs against the tickets they will close, and hire before burnout, not after.

Questions

How many tickets can one agent handle?

It depends on how long your tickets take. For email, divide an agent's productive hours by minutes per ticket. Count what yours close in a normal week, per agent, and use that rather than a rule of thumb: simple tickets take minutes and complex ones take hours.

Should I hire or use AI?

Test the AI on your own tickets first. If it can finish a good share of the routine ones, that can delay a hire, but it rarely replaces a person for the hard cases.

What is shrinkage?

The share of paid time agents are not available to customers: breaks, meetings, training, holidays and sick days. A staffing plan has to add it on top.

Written by Flatdesk, a help desk for small support teams at one flat price per agent. Try it free for 14 days, no card.