Call center schedule template, by hourly headcount.
For a call center or a support team, a schedule is read hour by hour: how many agents are on at 9 am on Monday, and at 3 am on Sunday. In this file you type each agent's shift once, and a second sheet counts the agents on in every hour of every day, next to the number you need.
Free, no email required. Made for Excel and Google Sheets (File → Import).
What is in the file
- Agents – one row per agent: team or queue, the start and end of the shift, and an x under each day they work. A shift that ends the next morning is typed as it is, and the sheet carries the hours after midnight into the next day.
- Hourly headcount – 24 hours by 7 days, three times: the agents you need, the agents scheduled, and the gap between the two. An hour with fewer agents than you need turns terracotta.
- Weekly hours – per agent, with anyone above the number at the top of the sheet marked.
How to use it
- List your agents with their shifts. Hours are typed on the 24-hour clock: 7 for 7 am, 15 for 3 pm, 23 for 11 pm, 24 for midnight. The Shift column reads them back as "7 am to 3 pm" so you can check.
- Put an x under each day an agent works. For a night shift, the x goes under the day the shift starts on.
- On the Hourly headcount sheet, type the agents you need in each hour of each day. Weekdays and weekends usually differ.
- Read the Gap block. In the example week, Sunday from 3 pm to 11 pm is one agent short.
- Change a shift or a day on the Agents sheet, and the headcount follows.
Where the numbers you need come from
From volume to agents, with simple arithmetic
If you have last month's contacts by hour, the calculation is short. Take the contacts that arrive in an hour, multiply by the minutes one contact takes, notes included, and divide by 60: that is the hours of work in that hour. No agent is on contacts for all 60 minutes of an hour, so divide by the share of the hour an agent does spend on them, and round up. Thirty contacts of 8 minutes are 4 hours of work. If your agents are on contacts for three quarters of each hour, that is 5.33, so six agents.
Phone queues
Where callers wait in a line, the usual method is the Erlang C formula, which also takes the answer time you aim for into account. Erlang calculators are free and easy to find online, and their result goes into the same Needed block. For email and tickets that can wait an hour, the simple method above is usually enough.
The overnight hours
When one agent is the whole team at 3 am, one agent short means nobody is on. Read the hours from midnight to 7 am first, for all seven days, including the hours that a night shift carries over from the day before.
Breaks and shift changes
The count does not take breaks off. If lunch breaks fall in the same hour, plan one agent more for that hour or stagger them. At a shift change, an hour of overlap or a written note carries the open cases across. The shift handover template is a one-page form for that note.
Common questions
Does the template work for a team that is on 24 hours a day?
Yes. Type a night shift with its real hours, for example start 23 and end 7, and put the x under the day it starts on. The hours after midnight are counted in the next day, and a Sunday night carries over into Monday.
Can a shift start on a half hour?
Yes. Type 7.5 for 7:30. The headcount is still shown per full hour, and an agent counts for an hour when they are on at the start of it, so a 7:30 start is counted from 8 am.
How do I plan more than one queue or tier?
Use one copy of the file for each queue. The Team or queue column is there for your own reference: the headcount counts every agent on the Agents sheet.
Does it work in Google Sheets?
Yes. Upload the .xlsx file to Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets, or use File → Import inside a sheet. The file uses drop-down lists, highlighted cells and the COUNTIF family of functions, all of which Google Sheets has.
When the template stops being enough
A spreadsheet counts the plan. It does not change when an agent swaps a shift, and it shows a gap only to the person who has the file open.
In Schedio you set how many people each window of the day needs, per team and job title, and the schedule marks every window that is short. When a window that is running right now is short, a message reaches the team channel in Slack, Telegram or WhatsApp. Agents see their own shifts, can offer a shift they cannot work, and the outgoing shift leaves a note for the incoming one. It costs $49 a month per location, for any number of agents.
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