Understanding Shrinkage
    • 14 Jan 2025
    • 3 Minutes to read
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    Understanding Shrinkage

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    Article summary

    Planning a customer support team involves understanding shrinkage, the time agents are unavailable for calls. Shrinkage types include external (vacations, sick days) and internal (breaks, meetings). To calculate shrinkage, consider total contracted hours, external and internal shrinkage percentages. Monitoring shrinkage helps optimize staffing and productivity. To view shrinkage data, use Dialpad WFM reports. Understanding and managing shrinkage is crucial for effective customer support team planning and resource allocation.

    A big part of planning a customer support team is understanding the impact of shrinkage. Shrinkage is the time when team members aren’t available to take calls or help with customer-related tasks.

    Shrinkage can happen for many reasons, and it’s important to factor it in when planning the number of agents needed to handle call volumes effectively.

    Let’s dive into the details.

    Types of Shrinkage

    There are two types of shrinkage, external and internal. 

    • External shrinkage - Includes factors beyond your control, like vacations, public holidays, or unexpected sick days.

    • Internal shrinkage - Includes team-controlled factors, such as time agents spend away from queues for breaks, meetings, training, and offline tasks like admin work.

    Download External Shrinkage

    To download data on your team’s external shrinkage, head to Dialpad WFM and navigate to Reports.

    1. Select Timesheets

    2. Select Export

    3. Navigate to Select teams or agents

    4. Select A cumulative summary

    5. Filter the date range

    6. Navigate to Additional options

      1. Check the box beside Breakdown by shift names/time off subtypes

      2. Check the box beside Include time of

    7. Select Download CSV

    View internal shrinkage

    Your team’s internal shrinkage can be viewed on:

    • The Performance page

    • The Insights page

    Let's look at each. 

    See shrinkage from the Performance page

    To get the shrinkage data on the Performance page, head to Dialpad WFM and navigate to Reports.

    1. Select Performance

    2. Filter the date range

    3. Select the teams and/or agents

    Then, take the inverse of the Utilization figure to calculate the internal shrinkage amount. 

    In the sample above, the internal shrinkage is 32%.

    Note

    To account for time lost due to non-adherence in your shrinkage report, add the inverse of the Time-on-Task to the non-utilized time shrinkage.

    For example, in the sample above, the combined internal shrinkage is 38.5%. (32% of non-utilised time + 6.5% of time spent out off-task)

    See shrinkage from the Insights page

    To get the shrinkage data on the Insights page, head to Dialpad WFM and navigate to Reports.

    1. Select Insights

    2. Filter the date range

    3. Select the teams and/or agents

    Navigate to the Queue and Offline activities breakdown. The Insight card on the right shows the percentage of agent time spent on queue activities for the date range. The inverse of this percentage is your internal shrinkage data — e.g., 42.6% in the example above.

    Note

    The Offline Activities section shows the percentage of each activity that contributes to your overall internal shrinkage, providing a detailed breakdown.

    Total working hours

    Know your team’s total working hours before calculating shrinkage.

    You can download your agent’s working hours, head to Dialpad WFM, and go to Reports.

    1. Select Timesheets

    2. Select Export

    3. Select the teams and/or agents

    4. Select A cumulative summary

    5. Filter the date range to weekly

    6. Select Download CSV 

    To calculate your team’s total contracted hours per week, sum the values in the weekly_contract_hours column and divide by the number of agents. You can then add this calculation for longer periods.

    Example

    You have 100 agents who work 40 hours a week. Over a 4-week month, that works out to 1600h.

    Calculate total shrinkage

    To calculate your total shrinkage, you’ll need these three values.

    • Total contracted hours

    • External shrinkage %

    • Internal shrinkage %

    Then, add your external and internal shrinkage percentages to get the total shrinkage value for the selected agents and period.

    Example

    4.5% (external shrinkage) + 50.2% (combined internal shrinkage) = 54.7% total shrinkage.

    If your team works 4500 hours a month, and your total shrinkage is 54.7% then you are losing 2461 hours a month from productive queue time.

    Tip

    Some teams find it helpful to express shrinkage based on one full-time agent to show the value of hiring and staffing to reduce shrinkage.

    For example, if a full-time agent works 173 hours a month, and your total shrinkage is 54.7% then that agent loses 94 hours a month to un-productive queue time. This means you only get 79 hours of queue time for each full-time agent hired or staffed.

    Calculate Shrinkage per queue

    When creating your queues, you’ll be asked to enter a shrinkage percentage to ensure your staffing plans account for the time agents spend away from the queue.

    Note

    You can use the same percentage for all queues, or create a specific percentage for each queue.

    To get the shrinkage data per queue, head to Dialpad WFM and go to Reports.

    1. Select Performance

    2. Filter date range 

    3. Select the teams and/or agents

    In the Breakdown table, select the By activity view and find the activities linked to that queue. 

    To calculate shrinkage for a queue, take the inverse value of Time-on-task and add the non-utilized time. The result will give you the queue's shrinkage.

    Example

    Based on the sample below, your non-utilized time is 35.9% + 10% spent off-task for the T1 calls queue. This means the total internal shrinkage for this queue is 45.9%.





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