Call center productivity and customer service levels suffer when agents do not make the most of every minute. Excessive training sessions, prolonged post-call documentation, and too many meetings have one thing in common: contributing to call center shrinkage and cutting into your profits.
In this comprehensive guide, we will discuss everything that leads to call center shrinkage and give you ways to calculate and combat it.
What is Call Center Shrinkage?
Call center shrinkage is the difference between the total number of staff scheduled to work versus the number of staff that can actually field customer interactions over a time period. It’s a core workforce management metric, because it hits your service levels, wait times and overall customer satisfaction directly.
Shrinkage accounts for any and all reasons agents are not available during their shifts (think planned meetings and training or unplanned sick leave or tardiness). Comprehending what shrinkage entails is key for managers looking to forecast staffing needs and ensure customer experience goals are met even with a short staff. Knowing your shrinkage will allow you to adjust schedules proactively and work against preventable and unexpected staff fluctuations.
Factors that Lead to Call Center Shrinkage
Shrinkage comes in all shapes and forms, but we can chalk it down to two categories: planned and unplanned shrinkage.
Planned Shrinkage
Planned shrinkage accounts for scheduled non-productive activities. These are essential to operations and agent development, so they must be factored into staffing forecasts. Common examples include:
- Team meetings
- Training and upskilling sessions
- One-on-one coaching
- Scheduled breaks and meal times
- Administrative tasks (e.g., follow-up emails, data entry)
These are predictable and relatively easy to manage using workforce management (WFM) tools. For example, if training takes up 8% of an agent’s week, that shrinkage should be built into schedule forecasts.
Unplanned Shrinkage
Unplanned shrinkage refers to unscheduled and often unpredictable interruptions that impact agent availability. These events are harder to anticipate but must still be accounted for in staffing plans. Common examples include:
- Sick leave or personal emergencies
- Late arrivals or early departures
- Unscheduled breaks
- Technical issues (e.g., system outages)
- Unexpectedly extended after-call work
An oft-overlooked factor is agents having to unexpectedly extend after-call work. In the retail industry, the average After Call Work time is anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes.[*]
How to Calculate Call Center Shrinkage?
To calculate call center shrinkage, add up the total number of weekly paid hours agents cannot serve customers, then divide it by the total number of weekly paid hours for all agents. Multiply this number by 100 to determine your call center shrinkage percentage.
To determine the total number of weekly paid hours that agents are unable to serve customers, add up all the factors that contribute to shrinkage:
- Average number of hours lost per week due to absenteeism
- Hours lost per week from meetings, lunch, breaks, staff events, idle time
- Hours lost per week due to pre-call and after-call work
For example, if your call center has 10 full-time agents each paid for 40 hours per week, you have 400 total paid hours per week. If each agent loses 12 hours per week on average to shrinkage, that means 120 total hours of shrinkage per week: (120/400) x 100 = 30% shrinkage.
Many call centers consider 30-35% a healthy shrinkage rate, but average shrinkage rates can range from 20% to 50%, depending on the industry.
How to Track Shrinkage in Call Centers?
Track call center shrinkage by monitoring agent status and attendance throughout the work week. The process of doing this keeps managers informed as they make decisions on staffing, performance management, and scheduling.
Leverage Workforce Management (WFM) Tools
Workforce management software allows you to automate your shrinkage tracking through:
- Logging agent activity as it happens
- Segmenting the difference between planned and unplanned time off
- Highlighting trends on a team-based or time-based perspective
On top of making these processes a breeze, effective WFM tools will provide both dashboards and reports that visualize shrinkage to help you understand where it’s coming from.
Categorize Shrinkage Types
To get the most out of your data, you need to categorize it into the planned and unplanned segments. This will allow you to:
- Find red flags like absenteeism rising or technical issues regarding specific tools
- Benchmark against your internal targets or your industry’s specific targets
- Name controllable factors (like scheduling excessive trainings or meetings)
Each call center has different definitions for what constitutes planned and unplanned shrinkage. Being able to identify causes on a granular level allows you to search for gaps in productivity and engagement with a fine-toothed comb.
Track on a Team and Individual Basis
Shrinkage happens on both a team and individual level, so pinpointing bottlenecks requires precision and not a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, should one team constantly display higher shrinkage due to extensive after-call work, you may need to improve existing processes or give them extra support.
Why Shrinkage is Bad for a Call Center
Call center shrinkage severely undermines your operations efficiency and causes customer dissatisfaction. Customers will not stand for subpar services, 80% say they’ve switched providers just because of one bad experience.[*]
Decreased Agent Morale and Productivity
High shrinkage underscores an overall lack of call center productivity. Agents that are off-task or offline cause your remaining agents to handle higher workloads, leading to burnout and stress. 63% of agents say they suffer high burnout rates.[*]
Burnt out agents diminishes service quality and leads to higher turnover rates, costing you much more in the long run.
Elevated Operational Expenses
Call centers will tend to overstaff to maintain service levels when shrinkage is high, this inflates your labor costs. Think about it this way, a shrinkage rate of 30% in a 100-agent call center means only 70 of your agents are serving customers, but all 100 are being paid a salary.
Longer Wait Times
The less time your agents have to serve customers, the fewer customers your call center serves per minute. This leads to longer queue wait times, excessive hold times, and slower service.
Failure to Meet Service Level Agreements
High shrinkage causes call centers to miss SLAs, something that leads to lost business opportunities and reputational damage.
Slower service leads to frustrated customers and reduced customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. It’s important to avoid customer frustration, as 88% of customers say they’d buy again from companies that provide good service.[*]
How to Reduce Call Center Shrinkage?
Reduce call center shrinkage by integrating a CRM platform, reducing the number of extra obligations placed on agents, and tracking agent adherence with call center software. Call center workflow automations and \appropriate staffing levels can further optimize efficiency.
Reduce Extraneous Obligations for Agents
Some of the biggest contributors to call center shrinkage are extra activities and demands placed on agents. These include staff meetings, coaching sessions, training programs, and other extraneous events like staff parties.
While these activities are necessary and often beneficial to workplace culture, they need to be appropriately balanced with agent work time.
Automate Call Center Workflows
Advanced call center software lets you automate workflows like routing tasks to the appropriate agent, notifying staff about relevant updates, dialing customers, and responding to missed calls or texts.
These automations save agents hours of work per week, reducing shrinkage.
Utilize AI for Post-Call Work and Workforce Management
Call center software’s built-in AI tools streamline agent tasks by summarizing calls, extracting highlights and action items, and automatically replying to messages and texts. These automations reduce agent post-call work time, cutting down on shrinkage.
This is why 81% of workers say AI helps them feel more prepared to deliver a strong customer service level.
Integrate a CRM Platform
Connecting call center workforce software with a third-party CRM platform, like Salesforce or Hubspot, lets you synchronize data like call records, customer interaction histories, and recent purchases. Synchronizing this data across platforms reduces post-call work time.
Ensure Appropriate Staffing Levels
If you staff a higher number of agents than necessary, they may spend the majority of their workday idle. On the other hand, agents in understaffed call centers may become burnt out, leading to a worse customer experience.
AI workforce management (WFM) tracks call volume to anticipate staffing needs and schedule agents automatically. This helps you avoid overstaffing, ensuring agents are more efficient with their paid work hours.
Do Not Let Call Shrinkage Shrink Your Bottom Line
Your call center shrinkage is more than a metric, it’s a reflection of your operation’s shortcomings and an exposé of areas needing improvement. Left unchecked, your call center costs inflate, your productivity goes down the drain, and your customer’s satisfaction levels erode.
Now armed with root causes of shrinkage and ways to measure and mitigate its impact, you can take back those hours of lost productivity to ensure your agents focus on what matters most: the customer journey. Whether through automation tools, smarter staffing, and streamlined workflows via workforce management software, you will manage shrinkage strategically and customer-centrically.
