The Call Center Shrinkage Calculator works out how much paid agent time is lost to breaks, meetings, training, admin and absence, and how many agents to roster to cover it.

How to Use#

Enter Paid hours per agent per day.
Under internal shrinkage, enter the average minutes per agent per day for Breaks, Team meetings and huddles, Coaching and training, and System downtime and admin.
Under external shrinkage, enter Leave and absence as a percentage of days.
Optionally enter Agents needed on the phones, for example from the Erlang C calculator. Leave it at 0 to skip the roster count.

Inputs#

Paid hours per agent per day: the paid shift, including breaks. Decimals are fine.
Breaks: paid breaks, and lunch if lunch is paid.
Team meetings and huddles, Coaching and training: averaged per day. A 1-hour weekly session on a 5-day week is 12 minutes.
System downtime and admin: logins, outages, emails and other off-phone work.
Leave and absence: share of rostered agent-days lost to planned leave, sick leave and unplanned absence.
Agents needed on the phones: how many agents must be taking calls at once.

Reading the results#

Internal shrinkage = (breaks + meetings + training + admin) / paid minutes
Total shrinkage = 1 - (1 - internal) x (1 - absence)
Agents to roster = agents on the phones / (1 - total shrinkage), rounded up

Total shrinkage, Internal shrinkage and Absence shrinkage as percentages.
Simple sum: internal plus absence, shown for comparison. It double counts, because an absent agent takes no breaks or training that day.
Agents to roster and how many of them are cover for shrinkage. If the simple sum would roster more agents, the tool says how many more.
Productive hours on a working day (paid hours less internal shrinkage) and Productive hours per rostered day (also averaged over absence).

Things to know#

If the minutes add up to the full paid day or more, or absence is 100% or more, no roster count is shown.
No benchmarks are built in. Shrinkage varies widely between centres, so use your own data.
You can enter the total shrinkage figure in the Erlang C calculator to turn agents on the phones into agents to schedule.