6 Proven Ways to Improve Agent Productivity and Efficiency
April 24, 2025
Ask any CX leader about their top priorities, and one goal always rises to the top: improving agent productivity. After all, contact centers exist to quickly and efficiently help customers with support requests, questions, and other services that encourage them to keep buying from the business.
Why? Because your contact center is the frontline of customer experience—and every second saved, every interaction improved, adds up to stronger loyalty and better business outcomes. Whether you're running a global support team or a lean internal help desk, boosting agent efficiency isn't just smart—it's essential.
Not sure where to start? We’ve got you. Here are five proven ways to improve efficiency and increase agent productivity, no matter your contact center’s size.
1. Right-size your resources and balance workloads
Whether handling returns or answering technical questions, your contact center thrives off ingesting customer queries quickly and efficiently. Before you can think about refining methods to improve agency productivity, you must first ensure you have enough people and balance their workloads.
How you manage this will depend on what types of services you offer. Are customer inquiries fairly routine? Or do they require investigation and problem-solving? More intensive requests mean more effort for your agents. Similarly, different channels (chat, phone, email, etc.) all require different amounts of effort.
Properly understanding a "normal" workload and comparing it against the individual skill levels of each team member will help you balance workloads and prevent burnout. After all, nothing kills productivity like burnout.
Another benefit of balancing agent workloads is increasing customer satisfaction. When you have enough people staffed and customers don't have to wait on the phone or for a response to their email, they're less likely to be irritated, helping to make your agents' lives a little easier and helping you increase agent productivity.
2. Provide the right processes, tools, and training
If you look at your contact center statistics and notice certain metrics like average handle time, first resolution rate, or post-call work time are long, take a look at what resources you're providing your agents. If your processes are inefficient, now's the time to fix them and boost agent productivity.
Same thing with your customer service software. More complex interactions (like tech troubleshooting or billing disputes) take more time and effort. Plan accordingly. When agents are set up for success with manageable queues and proper support, you’ll increase agent productivity—and reduce churn.
3. Use AI to boost agent efficiency
AI isn’t here to replace your agents—it’s here to make them unstoppable.
AI agents can handle the front-end lift of customer calls, collecting information, authenticating users, and even resolving basic inquiries—all before your live agents have to lift a finger.
When agents do join the conversation, they’re already equipped with:
The customer’s full context
Real-time transcription and summaries
Suggested next steps
This eliminates the need for repetitive questioning and searching through systems—instantly helping you improve agent productivity.
Finally, look at your training programs. Have they been updated recently? To what extent do they cover core and edge cases for handling customer communications? More robust training programs — especially if you offer technical products requiring more knowledge — help your agents increase their knowledge, improving efficiency during calls.
4. Level up your training and feedback programs
Training isn’t a “set it and forget it” checkbox. It’s a continuous performance engine.
Ask yourself:
Are your agents trained on both routine and edge-case scenarios?
Do they feel confident navigating every channel you support?
When’s the last time your training content was updated?
Robust onboarding and ongoing skill-building help agents feel empowered—and empowered agents are faster, sharper, and more effective.
No process or method should ever be set in stone. While this doesn't mean you should change the way things work at the drop of a hat, you most certainly should be open to feedback and change.
Create (or keep open) communication channels to collect customer and team feedback. The "Please hold for an agent survey" works well for phone calls. Get extended feedback over email through one-click emoji review requests.
For team feedback, set up regular occurrences where you collect their thoughts on what you should start, stop, and continue. This framework helps them organize their thinking into clear, actionable insights that you can use to help understand their work experience and identify improvements.
Plus, you get the additional benefit of showing you care about them beyond their employee ID and metrics. Happier employees are more productive, so do all you can to ensure they feel valued and listened to.
5. Work together to set individual goals
Motivation matters. Recognition matters. A well-supported agent is a productive one.
Just as you set departmental goals, you should also work with each team member to set individual goals. It's important to communicate that these goals are part of a larger company culture that prioritizes productivity.
Set clear performance goals. Celebrate wins. Inspire growth. By including agents in the conversation, you give them ownership over their productivity and their career.
Aim for a healthy balance between goals you need from the business's perspective (e.g., customer reviews, call resolution times, first call resolution rate) and those they provide (e.g., additional skills or knowledge areas).
Additionally, include both short-term and long-term goals. Short-term goals could last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months and should provide an avenue for a "quick win." Long-term goals will likely be closer to six months to a year and should be a bit meatier in size and depth. A good guideline is to base long-term goal timelines on the business's performance review cycles.
6. Motivate your team in the right ways
At the end of the day, money is a great motivator. After all, most of us need to work to fund other aspects of our lives. Ensuring your agents are well-paid helps improve efficiency. Consider offering bonuses for exceeding goals or KPIs. The more you reward hard work and effort, the more likely you are to improve productivity.
When it comes time for performance reviews, evaluate who has done especially well. Provide promotions and raises to those individuals and celebrate those wins with the team.
In addition to compensation, show them you value their work between one-on-ones and performance reviews. Bring in donuts or breakfast burritos on a random morning. If it's been an especially tough few days, buy them lunch to give them a boost.
Designated team bonding events, such as offsites or after-hours parties, can help your team connect with one another, building rapport and camaraderie. When your team is a tighter-knit group, they're more likely to share knowledge, collaborate on cases, and more, helping improve efficiency.
Your agents are at the heart of your customer experience. When you invest in them, efficiency improves across the board.
The bottom line
If you're ready to increase agent productivity and improve efficiency across your contact center, start by empowering your agents with more. Focus on smarter tools, better training, and AI-powered support that meets agents where they are—and helps them do more of what they do best.
The New CX Starts Here. And it starts with your agents.
