Relationship of Shrinkage and Phone Occupancy

Relationship of Shrinkage and Phone Occupancy

Could someone tell me the relationship of shrinkage and phone occupancy. Let say I have a 10 staff and phone occupancy of around 75 to 80% someone asked me if our shrinkage was at 20 to 30% what were the people doing in the 20% they are not occupied?

My answer was that they probably might be on breaks, late etc. Not sure if I was able to provide the correct answer because that person wasn’t seemed satisfied. Thank you so much in advance.

Question asked by Marge

“Occupancy is the P…

“Occupancy is the percentage of time agents spend handling calls (and after call work) compared with the total amount of time they are plugged in and ready waiting for calls to arrive.”

A better definition than I could type out myself.

If they are occupied for 80% of the time, they are idle and waiting for a call for the remaining 20% of time.

Industry standard is about 85-90% occupancy to prevent burnout and the associated issues that can cause. At 75-80% you’re not far off. Maybe on the slightly overstaffed side but it’s a small headcount you have, so changes can have bigger impacts.

The people on shrinkage aren’t even plugged in to take a call. They are completely out of the equation. They may, as you say, be on a break, or late. They might be sick, on annual leave, undertaking training etc, ultimately they are not undertaking their core role of being able to take calls.

Hopefully that makes some sense?

With thanks to Mark

I Agree With Mark

Mark has it right

For definitions on how they are calculated see

How to Calculate Contact Centre Shrinkage

How to Calculate Occupancy

With thanks to Jonty

Shrinkage and Availability

I have a similar question, comparing production shrinkage and availability.

So I guess I need to define what I mean by this, availability is the percentage of time that a rep is logged into the phone versus is available to take a call (or interaction, email, chat, etc), is on a call, or is on ACW.

And Production shrinkage is a measurement of anything that takes a rep away from their ability to take customer contacts, but supports the call centre such as meetings, out bound calls, added follow up, etc. Non-production Shrinkage is Breaks and PTO.

My question then is if my staff are 70% available, then is the 30% unavailable time, is this production shrinkage (less breaks)?

With thanks to Conor

Author: Jonty Pearce