The contact centre industry is one full of measurement and reporting. One of the main phrases that tends to get thrown about the sector is ‘shrinkage’. Too often its meaning and importance gets lost in the terminology that surrounds the industry.
The basic definition of shrinkage is the number of agents that can actively take customer calls, divided by the number of agents who are unable to.
Shrinkage = (# of agents needed to take calls ÷ # of agents available to take calls) x 100
Essentially, shrinkage equals the amount of time you pay agents to serve customers versus the amount of time they actually spend doing it.
So, what are the typical elements that mean agents are not available to take calls. These include external and internal factors.
External factors
- Holidays
- Sick time
- Absenteeism
- Lateness
- Early leaving
- Childcare needs
Internal factors
- Scheduled breaks
- Lunch and coffee breaks
- Team meetings
- Training
- One-on-one meetings
- After-call work
- Back-office work
For example, the scheduling team may predict that for an hour during the day 100 agents are needed to handle expected call volume. However, if at any point during that hour 35 agents are unavailable due to some of the factors above then the shrinkage ratio would look like this:
Shrinkage = (100 ÷ 65) x 100 = 153.8
Shrinkage in this case is 35% so 35% more agents will be needed to meet SLAs. However, one also needs to consider that this extra 35% will also have the external and internal factors.
A high shrinkage rate is an indicator of low performance. The more shrinkage, the fewer agents are available to help customers, which will lead to longer wait times and reduced customer satisfaction.
Some of these factors can be put into the schedules, often put together six weeks in advance, but as we have seen over the past year in particular, circumstances can suddenly change. Advanced planning can go out of the window and real-time teams have been put in place to try and rectify any gaps in service.
However, these teams can only react to an ever-changing scenario and in most cases, do not have the tools to make much of a difference anyway.
Intraday automation can make a huge impact on shrinkage rates by continuously and intelligently identifying where the likely peaks and troughs will be during the day, allocate agents as necessary as well as making time for both the external and internal factors that contribute to high shrinkage rates.
For too long contact centres have had to allocate a large percentage of agents for the ‘just in case’ element, intraday automation can allow managers to make informed decisions reducing shrinkage rates and increasing customer satisfaction levels.