What is a Call Center Shrinkage?

Shrinkage is a workforce management metric that refers to time in which agents are being paid but are not available to handle interactions. There is planned shrinkage, like agents being scheduled for staff meetings and trainings, and there is unplanned shrinkage, like an agent calling in sick or on vacation.

Shrinkage is important to measure, because contact centers need to factor shrinkage into their forecasts to ensure they will be adequately staffed.

For example: If 10% of the staff is expected to call in sick on a Friday, then the forecast can be increased by 10% to compensate for this eventuality.


How NICE is Redefining Customer Experience

NICE CXone is the industry’s only interaction-centric platform where channels, data, applications, and knowledge converge to improve customer experience at scale.

It is the leading, most complete and unified CX Platform on the market, used by thousands of organizations of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help you holistically run your call (or contact) center operations.


Back to Glossary

Contact us

If you would like to know more about our platform or just have additional questions about our products or services, please submit the contact form. For general questions or customer support please visit our Contact us page.