11 Proven Ways To Improve Agent Productivity And Performance
Written by Alina Fesenko
If you’re looking to improve agent productivity, you naturally want your team to do more in less time — though the benefits are even greater. Making your customer support agents more effective means better customer service, faster issue resolution and lower operational costs.
Efficient agents can handle more customer inquiries, reduce wait times and increase customer satisfaction. But boosting productivity requires the right approach from tracking key performance metrics to workflow optimisation and training strategies.
Whether you manage a call center, contact center, or a simple help center with agents handling customer interactions, you can adapt the strategies we’ve shared here to improve your support team’s efficiency and boost your customer satisfaction. Let’s get into it.
How do you calculate contact center agent productivity?
To improve agent productivity, you need to know how to measure it. Performance can be measured in two ways: efficiency and quality.
Below are some key agent productivity metrics to consider:
| Metric | Description |
| Average Handle Time (AHT) | The average time spent resolving a customer inquiry (measures call center/contact center productivity). |
| First Call Resolution (FCR) First Response Time (FRT) Time To Close (TTC) |
Percentage of issues resolved on the first attempt (call center/contact center productivity). Measures the time between when a customer initiates a chat and when an agent sends the first response.The median duration of a conversation from start to closure. |
| Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) | Direct feedback from customers on service quality. |
| Net Promoter Score (NPS) | Measures customer loyalty and likelihood to recommend. |
| Occupancy Rate | Percentage of an agent’s time spent actively working. |
| Resolution Rate |
The number of resolved cases vs. total cases handled. |
Tracking these metrics can help you get a clear picture of agent performance, overall productivity, and potentially pinpoint areas for improvement in center performance.
Thankfully, customer service automation software allows you to track any team member’s performance over a specific time.
Now that you know what to look for, let’s explore how to improve agent productivity — in 11 proven ways.
Improve agent productivity through workforce management: 11 tips
We’ve put together proven tips you can use to improve contact center agent productivity and customer service level.
1. Build comprehensive training and development programs
Well-trained agents work faster, make fewer mistakes, and provide better customer service. Ongoing training activities for customer service agents ensure they stay adaptable and strengthen their skills.
Focus on continuous learning
Regular training sessions help keep contact center agents updated on customer interaction trends, new tools, policies, and best practices.
Simulate real-world scenarios
Consider arranging role-playing exercises and real-case simulations to prepare agents for challenging situations — this will help improve their confidence and decision-making.
Your agents should know how to handle various customer issues, common customer inquiries, and learn some tested strategies to be able to deal with various groups of customers.
2. Empower agents with AI and automation tools
Achieve better agent productivity by reducing staff workload where possible. AI takes care of routine tasks, allowing agents to focus on complex customer interactions that require human expertise.
To make this approach even more effective, spend some time researching the AI tools on the market today and definitively identify which is right for your company and contact center needs.
Automate routine tasks
Use AI to handle FAQs and data entry, reducing the workload on agents. Chatbots would be also helpful here: they can handle simple user queries, freeing up much of your employees’ time.
Enhance agent decisions with AI insights
Customers expect personalized service — consider incorporating a knowledge management and customer support solution to be able to provide personalized and timely assistance to your customers. Real-time analytics provide agents with instant customer data, helping them respond faster and more effectively, which contributes to boosted customer satisfaction and enhanced customer experience. An all-in-one customer support solution may be just what you’re looking for:
3. Incorporate intelligent routing features to streamline conversations
Boost your agent productivity by incorporating intelligent routing features. They allow your help center to route customers to the suitable agent or a bot, saving a wealth of time for those contact center agents incompetent of solving the issue.
Routing not only offloads agents but reduces customer waiting time.
Consider implementing a smart customer service automation software to leverage all the innovative features and power of AI to level up your support and gain more customers!
4. Define clear, achievable performance metrics (KPIs) to measure agent performance
Agent productivity cannot be achieved without clear key performance indicators (KPIs). Agents need clear goals to stay focused and motivated.
Setting the right KPIs for customer service ensures they understand what’s expected and you have a tangible description of “high-quality service” you can compare current performance with.
Effective management of contact centers requires being able to set key metrics that align with your overall business goals.
Choose the right KPIs
Balance efficiency metrics (e.g., AHT) with quality (e.g., CSAT). You can also assign priority levels to certain metrics based on business needs.
Give agents visibility into their progress
You can implement real-time dashboards to help agents track individual agent performance and make adjustments as needed.
Yes, this is an additional expense in development, though it’s a one-time investment and having a visual representation of their productivity will keep your agents focused in the long run.
5. Encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing
Collaboration helps agents learn faster, solve problems quicker, and stay motivated. Good teamwork and open communication makes it easier to share insights and resolve customer issues.
Promote peer mentoring
Experienced support agents can fast track new team members by sharing best practices, troubleshooting techniques and time saving tips. Getting more knowledgeable support agents involved creates a support system within the team and gets new agents productive faster.
Build a shared knowledge base
Keep solutions, tips and best practices in one place. Effective knowledge management can save your team and your business time and resources. A well-organised internal knowledge base means agents spend less time searching for answers and more time applying their skills to serve customers, ultimately boosting agent productivity.
6. Provide self-service options for customers
Some issues can be resolved by the customers themselves, freeing up time for your support team to handle more complex cases.
It’s important to provide customers with the appropriate self-service opportunities so they can use all the possible resources to find a solution before reaching out to an agent (it may turn out that agent involvement was not necessary at all).
- Create an intuitive knowledge base for customers
A knowledge base where customers can search for their specific questions is a valuable self-help tool that can encompass hundreds of questions and issues in an easily accessible format.
On top of that, it’s highly advisable to set up FAQ pages with the most relevant questions complete with all the necessary information and details customers would need to resolve their questions.
Ensure that all the guides, FAQ pages and tutorials on your site are easy to find and understand.
- Use AI-driven virtual assistants
Another form of customer self-help is the use of AI assistants and chatbots. These are more sophisticated than your standard chatbot and can handle more complicated issues than require a lot of description, and customers will be walked through the solution process without support agent involvement.
If their query is still not resolved, the customer can simply ask the bot to be connected to a support rep. This helps increase agent productivity by ensuring they deal with less queries, but with higher quality and precision.
7. Prioritize agent well-being and balanced task assignment
Happy, healthy agents are more productive, engaged, and effective in their roles. Which is important to make your employees feel rewarded for what they do and increase agent productivity.
Maintain smart task allocation
Don’t overburden one person (or a group) with customer cases, but rather try to spread queries out evenly across your team. Keep an overview of task load across the team and balance it out.
Recognize and reward high performers
Public recognition and meaningful incentives help maintain morale and motivation. These rewards can be bonuses, unique opportunities, some perks specific to your company, which recognize high performance and encourage others to follow suit. It’s especially important to emphasize productivity and quality in the customer service sphere as a great deal of business growth and success hinges on brand perception and customer satisfaction.
8. Make it easy for your support agents to access the content they need
When your customers click on the support chat button on your website, surely, they expect to get a comprehensive consultation. Making sure your agents are well-versed on the topic is one of the most important components of your agent productivity.
Some companies gather content across CRMs, CMSs, collaboration tools, and shared documents, making it hard for support agents to access the needed piece of content. There is a way to alleviate this. Customer service software like HelpCrunch accumulate and keep all the needed information about your product or service and make it accessible for your agents within a few clicks.
Your agents can find, access and even share the needed info with customers in chats.
Apart from being able to share the needed info with customers timely, your support team can access customer data – it’s located right next to the chat in their HelpCrunch account. This data will let them view previous customer interactions, customer path and other info. This helps to streamline communication with customers, enabling your agents to provide personalized, timely assistance.
9. Continuously analyze and optimize workflows
Once you’ve developed a comprehensive customer support system with a structured journey from all self-service options to contacting a support rep, you’ll need to continuously track the effectiveness of your approach based on previously established metrics.
In doing so, you may find places for improvement and adjust your current support system to achieve even greater agent productivity, which in turn means higher customer satisfaction, issue resolution, and digital customer service level. To optimize your workflow, consider doing the following:
- Identify bottlenecks with performance data
- Run regular audits to help uncover inefficiencies in processes and tools
- Analyze response times, resolution rates, and customer feedback to pinpoint recurring issues
- Look for patterns in escalations and common complaints to determine where workflows may need adjustment
Involve agents in workflow improvements
Direct feedback from agents often reveals valuable insights for streamlining workflows. Since agents experience the process firsthand every day, they can identify inefficiencies that might not be obvious from a management perspective. Listen to suggestions of your team and take note of the most frequently mentioned bottlenecks.
10. Implement efficient quality assurance and compliance processes
If you’re running a support team, you know compliance isn’t something you can overlook—sticking to regulations like GDPR or HIPAA is very serious. If you mess up, the fines can be huge. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to monitor every single thing manually.
Automated tools and artificial intelligence can help you stay on top of compliance without taking up tons of your time.
Simplifying compliance is the perfect use case for automation. With the right systems in place, you can track everything in real-time and catch issues before they become a problem. That means your agents don’t have to stress about manually ensuring compliance. They can just focus on helping customers — meaning more productivity.
Establishing quality assurance
How to establish quality assurance? Keeping track of how agents are using their tools and what’s working is key. You want to know what’s driving good results and where things are slipping. When you track performance this way, you can spot trends and give agents the right training to get them back on track. When you adopt a data-driven approach, it’s easier to identify what’s slowing down your agents and fixing it — quickly.
Metrics like AHT and FCR (for measuring call center agent productivity) are staples for figuring out how agents are doing. But don’t just stare at the numbers and assume everything’s fine.
For instance, if AHT is a little higher than usual, is it because call center agents are really tackling tough issues, or is there some kind of inefficiency? Understanding the “why” behind the numbers will help you improve agent productivity.
Once you figure out where the gaps and potential bottlenecks are, you can give agents specific training on those areas, which makes a huge difference. The more you focus on the things that matter, the quicker agents get at resolving issues. And as they get faster, productivity goes up.
11. Align agent performance with customer experience metrics
Improving agent productivity doesn’t just mean getting through calls faster. It means making sure what they’re doing actually works for the customer. You can look at analytics – like average resolution time or first response time (first call resolution time for call centers), but it’s more about understanding how these numbers tie back to the customer experience.
Take FRT for example. If a customer only needs one call/message to get their issue sorted, they’re happier, right? But how much of that has to do with the agent’s speed vs. how well they resolved the issue? It’s not always about getting off the call/message fast—it’s about solving the problem right the first time. If you can figure out what really makes the customer happy, that’s when your agents can start working more efficiently.
Gather customer feedback
Metrics are useful, but they only tell part of the story. If customers are happier because their issue was resolved quickly, then that’s what you want to focus on. You don’t just want short calls (if you run a call center)—you want your team to make the right calls.
The same applies to chat agents. You want your agents to solve customer issues, upsell to them, and most importantly – guarantee customer satisfaction, not just close chats quickly. When you connect agent actions with customer satisfaction, you can figure out what agents need to do more of. That’s where you can really improve agent productivity.
But don’t limit your quality evaluation to just numbers; feedback from customers is huge. If an agent is getting a lot of good reviews because they solve problems in one call, that’s worth noting. You want to encourage that behavior. So, by understanding what customers value, you can train your agents to focus on the things that will actually improve productivity.
Consider incorporating chat ratings. You give customers the ability to rate a chat after it’s finished. It’s a simple feature available in customer service software. Then you’ll be able to track the satisfaction rate in the satisfaction report.
Aligning your agents’ goals with what matters most to customers helps create a better cycle. The agents know what works, they get the training they need, and they’re more productive since they know what they need to do. This way, your customers get their issue resolved quickly, agents are more focused and efficient, and your business continues to thrive.
Conclusion
Agent efficiency is crucial for the success of your business because exceptional customer service is one of the most important foundations of sustained growth. That’s why improving your support center productivity should always be a top priority.
And remember, once you’ve put these tips into practice, the evolution doesn’t stop — continuous data-based optimization along with a people-first mindset leads to long-term success.
