What is Call Center Shrinkage and How Do You Minimize It?
Key takeaways
Shrinkage typically consumes between 10% and 40% of a contact center's scheduled capacity.
Planned shrinkage is manageable; unplanned shrinkage is where service levels take the hardest hit.
Building all agent activities into your forecasts is the most effective step toward controlling shrinkage.
Poor schedule adherence is one of the biggest drivers of unplanned shrinkage.
Contact centers that actively manage shrinkage achieve higher service levels at lower operating costs.
What is call center shrinkage?
One of the most important concepts in schedule adherence is shrinkage. Shrinkage can be defined as the time for which people are paid during which they are not available to handle calls.
Many reasons can cause shrinkage, and they have to be taken into account when scheduling the required number of agents to ensure adequate coverage. But the truth is that most companies badly under-estimate the sheer volume of shrinkage that besets their call centers. This comes about due to a host of potentially hidden areas of contact center shrinkage.
Many managers keep their eye on several of these, but few are able to stay on top of all of them: lateness, talking to associates, personal calls and emergencies, leaving early and taking longer breaks. The bottom line on shrinkage is the number of minutes per day that agents are being paid to be on the phone when they are not actually working or available to receive calls or work on customer related issues.
Planned and unplanned shrinkage in contact center operations
Not all shrinkage carries the same operational risk. Planned shrinkage can be built into forecasts in advance. Unplanned shrinkage surfaces without warning, and that’s where customer service levels take the hardest hit.
| Type | Definition | Common Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Planned | Scheduled, anticipated time away from call-handling | Training, team meetings, scheduled breaks, vacation, lunch |
| Unplanned | Unexpected time away from call-handling with no advance notice | Tardiness, personal emergencies, extended breaks, early departures, system downtime |
Planned shrinkage, while unavoidable, gives operations teams something valuable: time to prepare. When internal shrinkage factors like training sessions, meetings, and scheduled breaks get factored into workforce forecasts from the start, contact centers can absorb that lost capacity without meaningfully disrupting service levels.
Unplanned shrinkage demands a different response. Because it arrives without warning, the impact lands directly on the agents still on queue — driving up handle times, lengthening wait times, and increasing the likelihood of abandoned calls. Over time, chronic unplanned shrinkage erodes more than operational efficiency and service levels; it can lead to burnout that affects employee engagement.
How can you track and control shrinkage?
So, how should you track and manage shrinkage in your call center? Shrinkage can be a major factor in failing to meet service level targets. Call centers that take shrinkage factors into account in their forecasting and scheduling typically achieve higher service levels at lower operating costs. They often do that by including all call-related activities in the forecast and schedule planning process.
Shrinkage vs. schedule adherence: what’s the difference?
Shrinkage and schedule adherence are closely related, but they measure different things. Understanding the distinction helps teams diagnose problems more precisely and apply the right fix.
| Shrinkage | Schedule Adherence | |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | The percentage of scheduled time agents are unavailable to handle customer interactions | The degree to which agents follow their assigned schedule — being in the right place, doing the right activity, at the right time |
| What it measures | Lost capacity across the team or operation | Individual agent behavior relative to their schedule |
| Expressed as | A percentage of total scheduled hours (e.g. 20% shrinkage) | A percentage of time in adherence (e.g. 92% adherence score) |
| Planned or unplanned | Both — planned shrinkage is built into forecasts; unplanned shrinkage is not | Primarily unplanned — adherence issues arise when agents deviate from what was scheduled |
| Where it shows up | Staffing shortfalls, missed service level targets, higher operating costs | Real-time queue imbalances, supervisor alerts, post-shift adherence reports |
| How it’s managed | Built into workforce forecasting and scheduling models | Monitored in real time via workforce management tools; addressed through coaching and reporting |
| Relationship to each other | Poor schedule adherence contributes directly to unplanned shrinkage. Shrinkage is the broader operational measure; adherence is one of its key drivers. | |
Why is calculating shrinkage important?
You can calculate shrinkage using the following call center shrinkage formula. First, determine your base staff requirements for typical call volume at each point in a given day or a given shift.
Within those calculations, estimate the typical percentage of workers who will be unable to handle calls during the interval. This amount may vary, but the usual range is somewhere between 10% and 40%. With this number, you should now divide your base staff requirement by that result to arrive at the number of workers you should schedule.
For example, with a 20% shrinkage rate and 160 call center agents on the day shift, you would divide 160 by (1 minus 0.2), for a total of 200. Now you know that if you schedule 200 people, but 20 percent can’t answer phones for various reasons, the remainder available will be 160, and the phones will be adequately covered.
These shrinkage calculations bring us to our next important question: how can you reduce shrinkage?
How do you reduce contact center shrinkage?
There are two main items to keep in mind to assist with minimizing shrinkage in your call center:
- Increase forecast and schedule accuracy by including all activities in your schedule. The more activities you include in your schedule, the more accurate of a forecast you will be able to create. This can include such items as average call time, after work-related tasks, emails, chats, meetings, training, breaks, lunch, and vacation.
- Monitor schedule adherence and work with your agents to improve over time. One remedy to help with this is to create monthly or weekly reports you can share with your team so they are aware of any reoccurring adherences to correct for the next time period. Maybe they didn’t allot for a long enough break, and that put them out of adherence, or maybe a meeting ran over that resulted in unplanned shrinkage. With a modern workforce management software, you have real-time adherence monitoring to quickly address problems that arise in order to get your contact center agents back on track with your carefully planned schedule.
How Verint helps you manage call center shrinkage
Managing shrinkage well isn’t just a scheduling exercise — it requires the right tools, data, and workflows working together. Verint’s workforce management solutions give contact center leaders the real-time visibility and forecasting precision needed to stay ahead of shrinkage before it affects service.
With Verint, teams can:
- Monitor schedule adherence in real time, so supervisors can address deviations as they happen rather than discovering them in a post-shift report
- Build all planned activities — training, meetings, breaks, and more — directly into forecasts, so shrinkage is accounted for before the day begins
- Identify patterns in unplanned shrinkage across agents, teams, and shifts, turning recurring problems into coaching opportunities
- Run accurate forecast vs. actual analysis to understand how shrinkage impacts service levels and where adjustments are needed
The result is a workforce management process that treats shrinkage as a known, manageable variable versus a surprise that throws off staffing at the worst possible moment.
Frequently asked questions
The average call center shrinkage rate is between 30%-35%, though this varies depending on operation size, industry, and workforce mix. Centers with strong workforce management practices and consistent schedule adherence tend to land at the lower end of that range. A shrinkage percentage above 35% typically signals underlying issues — whether in scheduling accuracy, agent engagement, or unplanned absence rates — that warrant closer investigation.
Call volume and shrinkage interact directly. During peak hours, unplanned shrinkage carries a steeper cost — less agent availability means longer queue times, higher abandonment rates, and increased pressure on the agents who are present. Conversely, during lower call volume periods, planned shrinkage activities like training sessions and meetings can be scheduled without meaningfully disrupting service levels.
Building shrinkage estimates into call volume forecasts at the interval level — rather than applying a single daily average — gives contact centers a more accurate picture of true staffing needs throughout the day.
External shrinkage factors refer to causes of agent unavailability that originate outside the normal operation of the contact center — things like severe weather events, public transportation disruptions, regional illness outbreaks, or unexpected system outages. Unlike internal shrinkage drivers such as training or scheduled breaks, external shrinkage factors are harder to predict and can affect large portions of the workforce simultaneously.
Contact centers can account for both internal and external factors by building a modest buffer into staffing models, maintaining flexible scheduling policies, and using historical data to identify seasonal or regional patterns that may signal elevated risk.
Shrinkage and customer satisfaction share a direct relationship. When shrinkage runs higher than forecasts account for, queues lengthen, wait times increase, and agents handle calls under greater pressure — all of which degrade the customer experience. Contact centers that actively manage shrinkage tend to maintain more consistent staffing levels, which translates to shorter handle times, higher first contact resolution rates, and stronger customer satisfaction scores.