If you’ve ever wondered why your contact center feels short-staffed even though the schedule says you have enough people, you’ve probably run into shrinkage.

Shrinkage is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in workforce management (WFM), but it’s often misunderstood, especially in small to mid-sized contact centers that don’t have a dedicated WFM team crunching the numbers. Let’s break it down.

What is Shrinkage?

At its simplest, shrinkage is the percentage of time that your agents are not available to handle customer contacts.

It includes:

• Breaks and lunches

• Team meetings

• 1:1 coaching sessions

• Training

• System downtime

• Unplanned absences (sick calls, no-shows)

• Miscellaneous offline work

If you schedule an agent for 8 hours, you don’t actually get 8 hours of customer-facing time. Once you account for all of the above, you may only get 6 hours (or less!) of actual customer handling time.

Why Shrinkage Matters

Here’s the tricky part: if you don’t account for shrinkage in your staffing calculations, you’ll constantly miss your service level targets, even when your schedule looks fully covered.

Example:

• You calculate you need 10 agents to handle your call volume.

• Shrinkage in your center is 25%.

• 25% of 10 agents = 2.5 agents unavailable.

This means you really only have 7.5 agents working — and your customers will feel it in longer wait times and dropped service levels.

How to Calculate Shrinkage (The Simple Way)

Shrinkage is the percentage of time your agents are scheduled to work but aren’t available to handle customer contacts — whether that time is paid or unpaid.

Two main types:

• Planned shrinkage: PTO/vacation, holidays, breaks, lunches, meetings, training.

• Unplanned shrinkage: Sick calls, last-minute call-outs (paid or unpaid), no-shows, system downtime.

Here’s how to figure it out:

1. Pick a Time Period

   • A full year is best for planning, but a month or quarter works if that’s all you have.

2. Add Up All the Time Agents Were Unavailable

   • Include both planned (like PTO, breaks, training) and unplanned (like sick time, unpaid call-outs, outages).

3. Add Up the Total Scheduled Time

   • The total hours agents were scheduled to work in that period — whether they actually worked or not.

4. Divide Unavailable Time by Total Scheduled Time

   • That’s your shrinkage percentage.

Example in Plain English:
If your team was scheduled for 800 hours last month, but 200 of those hours were missed due to PTO, breaks, training, call-outs (paid or unpaid), or downtime, your shrinkage is 25%.

That means you only had coverage for 75% of the time you planned — and that’s why it needs to be in every staffing calculation.

How to Reduce Shrinkage

While some shrinkage is unavoidable, you can keep it under control with a few key practices:

1. Track It Accurately

   • Measure shrinkage over a realistic period (30–90 days) so you’re not relying on guesswork.

   • Break it down by type: planned (breaks, meetings) vs. unplanned (absences, system issues).

2. Optimize Meeting & Training Schedules

   • Avoid pulling multiple agents from the floor at peak times.

   • Group sessions when possible.

3. Improve Schedule Adherence

   • Even a few minutes late from breaks across the team adds up fast.

   • Use adherence monitoring to spot trends early.

4. Cross-Train Agents

   • Having flexible staff that can move between queues can keep coverage strong when shrinkage hits unexpectedly.

Where Spark Queue Comes In

Here’s where most small contact centers struggle: even if they know their shrinkage number, factoring it into staffing plans across the whole week is tedious.

That’s where Spark Queue makes life easier.

• Shrinkage is built directly into every staffing calculation, no separate math required!

• Built-in Shrinkage Calculator helps you build an accurate percentage, so you’re not guessing or relying on outdated numbers.

• See how shrinkage impacts your coverage in real-time, across every interval of the day.

• If agents handle multiple queues, Spark Queue even breaks down how much time they’ll spend in each, so you’re not left guessing.

Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets and manual math, you can plan with confidence and hit your service level goals without overstaffing.

Bottom line: Shrinkage is a silent killer of service levels, but it doesn’t have to be. Understand it, measure it, plan for it, and use the right tools to keep it under control.