Shrinkage – ‘The Missing’

The Visibility Challenge – A Complex Data Dynamic

Sounds straight forward enough, but all too often, because of the amount of data available, the siloed nature of the key data systems, and limited experienced analytical resources, Contact Centre managers are not equipped with adequate insight about their resources or productivity, so are regularly caught off guard, especially by Shrinkage.

So, what is Shrinkage?

While your real-time system may offer visibility to the staff and activities of those who are active, but less common, is having direct visibility to the staff who are not productive, or not even logged in.

Shrinkage, in Contact Centres, is the combined total of all non-productive time spent away from the principal work activity. It is commonly expressed as a %, using a base of Total FTE Available Time (commonly 8.5 hours a day, 5 days a week), and comprises 3 key components:

• First Level Shrinkage, where staff are not in the office at all (this can be referred to as External Shrinkage). This includes all planned leave, or approved activities away from the workplace such as training, as well as absence or unplanned leave for emergencies, medical reasons etc.
• Second Level Shrinkage, where staff are in the office but are un-productive, or doing other things (which can be referred to as Internal Shrinkage). In a predominantly Inbound Contact Centre, this could include activities such as Call Backs, Comfort Breaks, Coaching, Escalations, E-Learning etc.
• Missing, which is the unaccounted-for time, whereby staff who are supposed to be at work, are not logged in.

An Expensive Buffer?

Current thinking in the industry suggests that Contact Centres need to factor in an extra 40% to 50% additional resource for Shrinkage, in order to function smoothly. To firstly validate this, and secondly to actually get this signed off and in place, takes a great deal of process review, detailed analysis, as well as the right convincing acumen in a manager to be able to justify this significant extra budget requirement.

Despite how important this headcount buffer is, somehow it is notoriously difficult to access decent quality Shrinkage information, even when using expensive and supposedly powerful WFM and multi-media systems. But why is this?

Disconnected and Fragmented Data

Due to the nature of Shrinkage, there can be multiple different types of activities in a single day, week or month, for each person. 1^st Level data usually resides in a WFM or in spreadsheets, and 2nd Level data is typically found in your multi-media platform.

Sometimes this raw data, when exported, needs some cleanup work before it can start to be used, due to data slippage, errors in the data, and often the naming conventions between the 1^st Level data, and 2^nd Level data aren’t as straightforward as you’d like. Even when clean, the data itself is complex, with multiple activities that need to be grouped, or require intervention in order to achieve integrity.

So, very often, this data can’t simply be imported into a chart and be used straight away. It requires intervention, which takes effort and time to resolve, and this can be frustrating.

And sometimes things don’t go exactly to plan when managing your real-time Operations, and just when you need it most, you just can’t quite get a full picture of where everybody is.

The Fix

Now these problems are certainly not insurmountable, as all of the required information can be extrapolated from this raw data, but if managers want this to be available at all times, certainly some automated process needs to clean, prepare and transform this data systematically so that it becomes useable, meaningful and accurate.

Then this new ‘Insight’ needs to be made available to managers at all levels, in an easy to access manner, whereby any anomalies or issues can be quickly identified, understood, with corrective actions put in place, minimizing any wastage.

‘The Missing’

Even well-oiled Contact Centres can lose up to 5% of their staff resources due to absence, abscondment, staff failing to adhere to their shift times, or through legitimate or unplanned activities that have not been logged in correctly.

By nature, there isn’t any record of Missing in the raw data. It is a void that is only made apparent once you have subtracted the known 1^st Level, and 2^nd Level Shrinkage activities from the total combined scheduled shifts.

To achieve this you need a schedule for your team. In this way, you have a base, to compare what you should have, with what you actually have. To do this manually in small teams might be achievable periodically, but in larger teams this becomes unrealistic without automation.

What is certain, is that once you start to report this regularly, and make this ‘Insight’ easily available to managers, any unsavoury behaviour in your team changes almost immediately, because it is so easy to spot.

An interesting point to note here though, is while sometimes staff will be late, and some do abscond from work occasionally, this type of reporting is not always about finding bad apples. It happens regularly, whereby staff have reported in sick or on emergency leave, and the Team Leader has forgotten to update the system.

So regular reporting of the staff contributing to Missing, provides for a solid mechanism to ensure managers are entering their staff records properly, on time, which ensures tighter reporting integrity over time, and ‘missing’ staff can fully accounted for.

Human Nature

Through the benefits of automation, other ‘Insights’, can also be gained into staff behaviour, such as staff frequently staking emergency or medical leave before or after Off Days or Annual Leave; details which can be totally overlooked in a manual reporting environment.

Human nature dictates that we will always strive to take the shortest route to get the maximum possible personal gain, especially when we are flying under the radar, so as soon as this type of visibility is made available to managers, staff tend to react immediately, and change such behaviours, which results in more productive hours and a resulting better grade of service to customers.

The Full Picture

Being quipped with a full picture of Planned, as well as Unplanned Shrinkage activities, of those in the office, and those absent, aids better understanding of staffing dynamics and therefore results in more effective resource planning for the future.

Managers will be able to determine the exact shrinkage targets and padding required in their environment, and will be in a stronger position to make better informed decisions and formulate the most effective support strategy based around the resources that they have available.