Contact Center Efficiency
Efficiency starts with knowing where paid hours go. HiveDesk tracks time automatically, compares it with every shift, and reports shrinkage, adherence, and overtime for $5 per user per month.
The Four Numbers Behind Efficiency
A contact center pays for every scheduled hour. Efficiency is how many of those hours reach customers. These four metrics explain most of the gap.
Shrinkage
The share of paid hours when agents are not available for contacts: breaks, training, meetings, absence, and lateness.
Shrinkage calculator →Schedule adherence
Whether agents start, break, and finish when the schedule says. Small daily slips compound into understaffed intervals.
Schedule adherence explained →Occupancy
The share of logged-in time spent handling contacts. Too low wastes paid hours; too high burns agents out.
Occupancy rate explained →Overtime
Overtime is often the clearest sign that schedules and staffing are out of step with demand, and the easiest cost to see in payroll.
Overtime calculator →How HiveDesk Makes It Visible
One system for hours, schedules, attendance, and activity, available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome, and iOS.
Automatic time tracking
Agents track time from desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, a Chrome app, or the iOS app. Timesheets are generated from tracked time, with an optional approval step.
Activity monitoring
The desktop app captures periodic screenshots and keyboard and mouse activity levels during work hours, so managers can see how time is spent.
Shift scheduling
Build and publish shifts, reuse saved schedule types as templates, post overtime slots for agents to commit to, and review shift change requests.
Attendance and time off
Clock-in and clock-out times are compared with each shift using a late threshold you set. Time-off requests and approvals sit alongside worked hours.
Shrinkage and adherence reports
The Shrinkage report compares scheduled and actual hours by agent and date; the Adherence report shows check-in and check-out adherence by site.
Live view and reporting
Ongoing Sessions shows who is working right now. Reports filter by date, site, team, agent, and timezone, and export to PDF or Excel.
Where HiveDesk Fits
Contact center efficiency has two halves. The contact side (handle time, first-contact resolution, queue wait, service level) lives in your phone or contact center platform. The workforce side (who was paid, who was working, and whether they were where the schedule needed them) is what HiveDesk covers.
The two meet in staffing. An Erlang C calculation tells you how many agents each interval needs; the shrinkage rate tells you how many to schedule; HiveDesk tells you whether the people you scheduled actually turned up and worked. Our guide to shift scheduling and shrinkage management walks through the full loop.
HiveDesk has served remote and contact center teams on six continents since 2011, and teams stay an average of more than three years. See how it works for each part of your operation on the contact center roles page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Start from paid hours and work out how many were available for contacts. Shrinkage measures the hours lost to breaks, training, meetings, absence, and lateness; schedule adherence measures whether agents worked when scheduled; occupancy measures how much logged-in time went to contacts. Track each one by week and by team, and watch the trend rather than a single number.
HiveDesk measures the workforce side of efficiency: hours worked per agent and per project, attendance against each scheduled shift, adherence, shrinkage hours, overtime, and activity levels with periodic screenshots from the desktop app. It does not measure call metrics such as handle time, first-contact resolution, or queue wait time; those come from your phone or contact center platform.
HiveDesk does not connect to phone systems or contact center platforms. Its promoted integration is Asana, where time can be tracked inside Asana itself, and a Public API is available on request. Reports export to PDF and Excel for use alongside your other systems.
Agents can install the apps and start tracking time on the first day of the 14-day free trial, which needs no credit card. Schedules, sites, break types, and overtime rules can be set up by a manager in the web app as you go.
HiveDesk is $5 per user per month with every feature included and a minimum of three users, so the smallest account is $15 per month. There is one plan, with no feature tiers.
HiveDesk makes hours, overtime, attendance, and shrinkage visible, which is where most avoidable labor cost hides. Whether that turns into savings depends on what your managers do with the data. Use the ROI calculator to test the break-even point with your own numbers: at $5 per user, the subscription costs about the same as a few agent-hours a week across a 50-agent team.
Ready to Get Started?
Join teams worldwide who trust HiveDesk for workforce management, time tracking, and employee monitoring. $5/user/month, all features included.