What is Call Volume?

Call volume is a measure of how many inbound calls are coming into a contact center. It can be measured in various time increments, such as every fifteen minutes, every hour, or each day. Workforce managers may look at call volume per fifteen-minute interval when producing schedules, while executives may only be interested in daily or monthly call volumes. Call volume can also be reported on by the phone number dialed or compared year over year or graphed by time of day. There are many ways to slice and dice it.

Contact centers put a lot of focus on call volume because it represents the amount of work they need to do and therefore drives staffing and scheduling decisions. Call volume usually varies by time of day. For example, a business could have heavy volume during business hours and light traffic in the evenings. Call volume can also fluctuate by time of year. For example, retailers may have a really large spike in volume for a few weeks during the Christmas shopping season.

Companies with wide seasonal fluctuations in call volume face unique challenges with staffing and technology costs. Many choose cloud-based software solutions because of the flexibility of pricing and the ability to scale up and down to match call volume fluctuations.