Definition
Utilisation is productive (contact-handling) time divided by total paid time. Because the denominator includes everything you pay for, breaks, meetings, training, absence, utilisation is always lower than occupancy for the same operation.
A site with 16,000 paid hours, 30% shrinkage and 9,520 hours of handle time has 85% occupancy and 59.5% utilisation. Both numbers correctly describe the same month.
Utilisation has no universal benchmark because it depends on your shrinkage definitions. Compare it only against your own trend or against sites using an identical definition.
Why it matters
- Utilisation is the metric finance uses to sanity-check labour cost per contact.
- Reporting utilisation while labelling it occupancy invites bad decisions, someone will conclude the floor is idle and cut headcount.
- Tracking the gap between the two over time is a clean way to show the cost of rising shrinkage.
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