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 out 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 you expect that 10% of your staff will call in sick on a Friday, you can increase the forecast by 10% to compensate for this.

How NICE can help

NICE CXone is the market leading contact center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its contact (or call) center operations. CXone includes:

Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.

Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).

Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.

Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI) – leading-edge, intuitive technology that eliminates mundane tasks and speeds resolutions of customer issues for better business outcomes. It provides self-service, agent-assisted and fully automated alerts and actions.

CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic contact center software solution capable of elevating customer experiences for companies of all sizes.


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