Occupancy
The share of an agent's available time actually spent handling calls.
Occupancy is the share of an agent's available time that is actually spent handling calls. Talk time plus after-call work, divided by the time they were logged in and ready to take a call.
The word "available" is doing the work in that definition. Time an agent spends paused, in training or at lunch is excluded - occupancy measures how well you filled the hours they were ready to work, not how much of their shift was productive. That second number is agent utilization, and confusing the two is the most common reason two reports disagree about the same team.
What it tells you
Occupancy is a pacing signal. Low occupancy means agents sit waiting between calls: the dial level is too low, the list is not connecting, or you have more agents on the campaign than the list can feed. High occupancy means the opposite - calls arrive the moment the last one ends.
The trouble is that high occupancy is not free. There is no recovery time between conversations, and sustained above the mid-eighties it produces the effects you would expect: shorter calls, rushed dispositions, more sick days and more resignations. The industry rule of thumb - healthy somewhere in the seventies to mid-eighties - is really a statement about how much continuous conversation a person can sustain, not about the dialer.
Moving it
Upward, if agents are idle: raise the auto dial level, improve list quality so more calls connect, or move agents off the campaign. Watch drop rate as you go, because dial level buys occupancy with abandonment risk.
Downward, if agents are saturated: lower the dial level, lengthen wrap-up time, or add headcount.
Where to read it in VICIdial
The agent time reports break each agent's session into talk, wait, pause and wrap-up. Compare the same shift across days rather than comparing agents against each other - occupancy is mostly a property of the campaign and the list, so ranking people by it usually just ranks the campaigns they happened to be on.