Hey everyone! I am wearing about five different hats today and I am stuck on a WFM problem. I am trying to set up our first official schedule for our 20 agents, but the ‘Shrinkage’ numbers are making no sense to me. I have entered our expected holiday time and training sessions, but the system keeps telling me I am understaffed even when I know we have enough people on the floor. Is there a trick to how Genesys Cloud calculates planned vs unplanned shrinkage, or am I just missing a simple toggle in the business unit settings? Any help would be great!
I understand the confusion. In long-term forecasting, we treat shrinkage as a critical multiplier. Genesys Cloud calculates shrinkage by subtracting the planned and unplanned time from the total available agent hours.
You must ensure that your ‘Activity Codes’ are correctly mapped to the ‘Shrinkage’ category in your Business Unit settings. If a training session is not flagged as shrinkage, the system will assume those agents are available for interactions, which will skew your requirements and make it look like you have more coverage than you actually do.
I see this in RFP evaluations all the time! The problem is that the ‘Shrinkage’ calculation in Genesys Cloud is extremely rigid. If you are a small shop with only 20 agents, a single person going on an unscheduled break can throw off the entire model because the system does not handle small-group variance very well. You absolutely should look into the ‘Service Level’ impact of your shrinkage settings.
Sometimes it is better to manually adjust your staffing buffers in a spreadsheet and then just use the WFM tool for the actual scheduling, rather than trusting the internal requirement engine to understand your specific operational reality!