Shrinkage calculator
Shrinkage is the share of paid time your agents are not available to handle contacts. Enter what a typical agent loses to leave, sickness, training, meetings and breaks, and the calculator gives you total shrinkage, splits it into external and internal, and turns it into the number of agents you must schedule to keep a target number on the phones.
Share of paid time not available for contacts.
- External shrinkage
- 15.8%
- Internal shrinkage
- 17.3%
- Shrinkage multiplier
- 1.49×
- Productive hours per agent per week
- 25.1 h
- Agents to schedule
- 30
Leave, public holidays, sickness.
Training, meetings, breaks, other.
Multiply a productive requirement by this.
To keep 20 on the phones.
Show the working
- Paid hours a year = 37.5 × 52 = 1950 h; a working day is 7.50 h.
- External = (25 + 8 + 8) days × 7.50 h = 307.5 h, which is 15.8% of paid time.
- Internal = (2 + 1 + 1) h × 52 + 30 min × 5 days × 52 ÷ 60 = 338.0 h, which is 17.3%.
- Total shrinkage = 15.8% + 17.3% = 33.1%.
- Multiplier = 1 ÷ (1 − 0.331) = 1.495; 20 on the phones × 1.495 = 29.9, rounded up to 30.
Doing this for every interval of the week? Pebble WFM computes the requirement from your forecast and builds the roster. Free month, no card needed.
How shrinkage is calculated
Everything is converted to hours a year and compared with paid hours a year (contracted hours multiplied by 52). Leave, public holidays and sickness are entered in days, so they are multiplied by the hours in a working day. Training, meetings and other off-phone time are hours a week, and breaks are minutes a day multiplied by working days.
External shrinkage is time out of the building: annual leave, public holidays and sickness. Internal shrinkage is time in the building but off the phones: training, coaching, meetings, breaks and admin. Planners separate them because external shrinkage is largely fixed by contracts and HR data, while internal shrinkage is under the planner's control and can be scheduled around the demand curve.
The shrinkage multiplier is 1 divided by (1 minus shrinkage). At 30 per cent shrinkage the multiplier is 1.43, so 20 agents on the phones needs 29 on the roster. The calculator rounds up because you cannot schedule a fraction of a person.
Read the full guide: How to calculate contact centre shrinkage
Frequently asked questions
- What is a typical contact centre shrinkage figure?
- Most centres land between 25 and 35 per cent once everything is counted, and a figure under 20 per cent usually means something has been left out, most often breaks or coaching. Measure yours rather than borrowing a benchmark: a small change in shrinkage moves the headcount you need by more than most forecast errors do.
- Should breaks count as shrinkage?
- If they are paid, yes. Shrinkage is measured against paid time, and an agent on a paid break is paid but unavailable. Unpaid lunch is not paid time, so it is excluded from both the numerator and the denominator.
- Is shrinkage the same as absenteeism?
- Absenteeism is one component: sickness and other unplanned absence. Shrinkage is the total, planned and unplanned, internal and external. Some tools report shrinkage as a percentage of scheduled time instead of paid time; be consistent, because the two definitions give different multipliers.
- Why apply shrinkage after Erlang C rather than before?
- Erlang C tells you how many agents must be handling contacts. Shrinkage tells you how many you must schedule to get that many. Applying it to the requirement keeps the two questions separate and shows how much of your roster is going to non-productive time.
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