Improving agent productivity in the call center matters more than ever. Even with an increasing number of customers using digital channels to interact with businesses, many still prefer to pick up the phone — especially when the issue is complex or time-sensitive.
Research from Invoca shows 67% of consumers called a business during their buying journey, and calling is the channel they turn to when they need help with a purchase. In other words, live conversations remain a critical touchpoint where businesses can either earn loyalty or lose it.
At the same time, contact centers are being asked to do more with leaner teams. Burnout, turnover, and tight labor pools make it challenging to staff teams appropriately to meet demand. That’s why improving agent productivity is so important — when agents have the right data and guidance, they can work faster without sacrificing the customer experience.
In this post, we’ll walk through nine proven strategies — spanning technology, process, and people — to help you improve agent productivity in your call center.
Main Takeaways
- True agent productivity isn’t just handling more calls; it’s resolving them effectively the first time. Tracking metrics such as average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR), and occupancy rate (OR) together provides the best view of performance.
- AI tools can handle routine tasks, such as post-call notes, provide real-time coaching, speed up onboarding, and identify performance gaps, allowing agents to focus on higher-value customer interactions.
- Data-driven coaching, balanced schedules, recognition programs, and flexible shifts help improve agent morale, retention, and productivity.
- Tracking return on investment (ROI) and retention impact — including measuring cost per contact, revenue per agent, and savings from reduced turnover — demonstrates the financial value of productivity initiatives and supports continued investment.
What Is Agent Productivity?
Improving agent productivity isn’t just about enabling team members to do more — it’s about helping them resolve more issues, faster. An agent who handles twice as many calls as their peers isn’t more productive if those calls lead to repeat contacts.
Truly productive call center agents handle a steady volume of calls, resolve issues on the first attempt, and leave both the customer and the supervisor satisfied.
When you achieve the right balance between quantity and quality, you can improve cost efficiency in the call center, keep customers satisfied, and maintain smooth operations.
How to Measure Agent Productivity
You can’t improve agent productivity without first measuring how productive agents are right now. Measuring agent productivity requires analyzing multiple factors, such as how efficiently they handle calls, as well as the quality, consistency, and outcomes of those calls. No single metric captures any of these factors exactly. You must track and review multiple metrics to develop a complete picture of productivity.
These are the three core metrics that, when tracked together and compared over time, provide the most powerful insight into agent productivity.
- Average handle time (AHT) is a common metric used to measure the efficiency of customer service representatives in a contact center. AHT measures the total time agents spend managing a call. It includes both talk and hold time, as well as after-call work (ACW), which includes any reporting the agent must complete to resolve and log the call. While AHT doesn’t provide insight into call quality, it does highlight friction in the customer journey, such as excessive hold times, and helps you streamline processes and workflows. An average benchmark for AHT is about six minutes.
- First contact resolution (FCR) is an indicator of call quality and efficiency. FCR measures the percentage of calls an agent resolves in one call — no follow-up needed. To calculate FCR, divide the number of calls resolved on first contact by the total number of calls, and then multiply by 100. Many contact centers aim for an FCR rate between 70% and 79%.
- Occupancy rate (OR) is the total time an agent spends on call-related work compared with their total time worked. It helps call center managers balance workloads, manage agent burnout, and plan staffing levels more effectively. When occupancy climbs above 90%, it’s a signal that agents are stretched too thin — and productivity may start to decline.
*Data sources for table: FCR Benchmark Report (SQM Group), Contact Center KPI Benchmarks by Industry (Nubitel), Industry Standards for the Top Call Center KPIs (SQM Group), and Top Call Center Statistics to know (Sprinklr, 2025).
9 Strategies to Improve Agent Productivity
So, how do you maximize metrics like AHT and FCR to improve agent productivity? Below are nine strategic steps across tools and technologies, processes, and people. Implementing these practices can help you enhance agent performance in your call center.
1. Create a Comprehensive Performance Measurement Framework
Establishing a comprehensive framework for performance measurement formalizes your process and helps you track key metrics effectively. Your framework should:
- Define clear benchmarks: Review historical performance as well as industry standards (such as those outlined in the table above) to establish data benchmarks that are meaningful for your framework and agents. Ensure benchmarks align with your business goals. For example, if your focus is customer retention, be sure to emphasize metrics like FCR and the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Setting realistic targets that balance operational efficiency with quality helps create achievable benchmarks.
- Use automated quality management: Automated quality management tools take your performance framework a step further by spotting issues immediately and doing so at scale. Platforms like Invoca automatically analyze call conversations and surface quality anomalies — for example, when an agent doesn’t use the correct greeting, follow the script, or close the call properly. This reduces the need for time-consuming manual call reviews, freeing managers to focus on coaching, process improvements, and building a stronger performance program.
2. Use the Right Technology to Help Agents Work Smarter
One of the most effective strategies to improve agent productivity is to take low-value work off your team members’ plates. AI tools can help: A study of 5,172 customer support agents found that using a generative AI assistant resulted in a 15% increase in task completion. The most significant gains were observed among newer and less experienced agents.
Here’s a closer look at how using the right technology can help your agents work smarter:
- Automate routine tasks: Major productivity gains can be achieved by automating post-call administrative work, such as writing notes, updating the customer relationship management (CRM) system, and tagging outcomes. An AI-powered conversation analytics tool like Invoca can capture and analyze 100% of calls, generate accurate transcripts, and automatically create call summaries with key details like interest, intent, outcome, and next steps. That means agents can move to the next call faster.
- Speed up onboarding: AI tools for the contact center can help reduce the learning curve for new agents and accelerate their ramp-up by providing guidance, support, and customized training and tutorials.
AI tools can also help to:
- Accelerate training: AI helps new agents perform more like experienced pros by delivering targeted, personalized learning.
- Enable data-driven coaching: Supervisors gain insights into where each agent requires additional support, allowing them to spend coaching time more effectively.
- Reduce cognitive load: With AI surfacing answers and next best actions, agents can stay focused on the customer instead of searching for information.
- Promote consistent service delivery: AI reinforces best practices and standardizes call handling, so customers get a consistent experience across the team.
3. Streamline Processes and Workflows
Technology is a powerful way to remove friction from agents’ day-to-day work — and that’s essential for improving agent productivity. Here’s how implementing the right tools can help streamline processes and workflows in the call center:
- Improve call routing: Long hold times and multiple transfers can harm customer satisfaction. Intelligent call routing — including dynamic call routing — directs callers to the best available agent based on factors such as location, intent, and even pre-call online behavior. For example, if a caller just viewed a product page online, the system can route them directly to a sales agent instead of general customer service, reducing transfers and speeding up resolution time.
- Arm agents with data: According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect their interactions with brands to be personal. That means agents need to know who the caller is — and why they’re calling — before they say hello. Tools like Invoca PreSense surface pre-call data, enabling agents to greet customers by name, reference their recent activity, and quickly determine their likely intent. This reduces call friction, shortens handle time, and creates a better experience because callers don’t have to repeat themselves. Watch the short video below to learn how PreSense works:
4. Empower Agents with the Right Tools
Providing the right tools to agents can set them on the path to better performance. Here are two that can directly impact agent productivity:
- Unified agent desktop: Agents often have to jump between systems to find customer details, product info, promos, and account history — which slows them down. Bringing these sources together into a single desktop view means agents can stay in one place during the call. Less tab-hopping means less cognitive load, fewer errors, and faster resolutions, which helps reduce AHT and keeps agents focused on customers.
- Seamless integrations: It’s not enough to have great tools — they need to work together. When your CRM, knowledge base, and conversation analytics platform are fully integrated, agents get a complete view of the customer journey in one place. Invoca’s integrations, for example, automatically enter caller details into your CRM based on conversation insights, ensuring records are updated quickly and accurately.
Other modern tools for the call center that help improve agent productivity include:
- Predictive dialer software that automates outbound calling, making it less time-consuming for sales agents to call long lists of customers
- Computer telephony integrations (CTI), which seamlessly connect phones with computers so agents can easily answer calls and provide a true omnichannel experience
- Call recording and transcription software, which removes the need for agents to take notes and provides a robust database of caller information.
- Noise-canceling headsets that help reduce background distractions and give agents and callers a clearer audio experience
5. Invest in Meaningful Training and Coaching
Agent training shouldn’t stop after onboarding. Ongoing coaching, refresher sessions, and updates — especially when you roll out new technology — should be key components of your productivity plan. Focus on providing:
- Skill-based training: Generic training rarely moves the needle. Use AI and other tech tools to surface individual performance data and identify real-world skill gaps, then build targeted training around them. Invoca’s automated quality management and conversation analytics make it easy to spot coachable moments across thousands of calls without requiring managers to listen to every interaction.
- Ongoing coaching sessions: Create a regular cadence for coaching based on best practices, and ground it in actual customer calls. With Invoca, you can quickly pull examples where an agent missed a step, didn’t follow the script, or handled an objection well, and turn those into weekly sessions. Just keep an eye on volume — if you schedule more than one coaching session per week, agent attrition can rise sharply after about six months.
6. Balance Workloads and Scheduling
Improving agent productivity requires call center leaders to manage staffing, scheduling, and workloads effectively. By using historical data and predictive analytics, you can prevent understaffing, which creates pressure on your team, and overstaffing, which drives up costs. You can also:
- Use forecasting to match demand: Forecasting tools help you align staffing with expected call volumes. You can factor in known events — like a new model launch at an auto dealership — and analyze historical trends, seasonality, and campaign activity to build more accurate schedules.
- Implement flexible scheduling models: Flexible staffing supports productivity by boosting morale and reducing burnout. Tools like shift bidding (agents bid on preferred shifts based on seniority or performance) and split shifts (longer breaks between work periods) help you meet business needs while accommodating agent preferences.
- Monitor schedule adherence: Once the schedule is live, watch it closely. Track where agents are stretched, out of adherence, or underutilized so you can make adjustments quickly. With Invoca, contact centers can view reports that compare call handling across all business locations, so they can identify gaps.
7. Foster Motivation and Engagement
Engaged call center employees are more productive. Gallup finds that highly engaged teams experience lower attrition and absenteeism, and achieve up to 14% higher productivity. Engagement also drives sales performance and boosts customer loyalty, ultimately improving profitability. With that in mind, make a point to:
- Set individual goals: Keep agents motivated by setting personalized goals that align with team objectives. Make them SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound — so agents know what success looks like without feeling overloaded.
- Recognize achievements: Call out wins regularly. Highlighting strong performance shows agents what “good” looks like and encourages others to match it. Offer clear career paths and development opportunities, such as training stipends or supported courses. Recognition programs that work well in contact centers include gamification (badges, challenges, leaderboards) and experiential rewards — like “Dinner on Us” or travel vouchers — to keep agents engaged and performing.
8. Create Self-Service Options for Customers
You can reduce agent workload and still deliver a great experience by giving customers self-service options for simple or after-hours inquiries. That way, agents can stay focused on complex, high-value interactions. So, consider:
- Setting up a knowledge base: Basic self-service begins with a comprehensive, searchable knowledge base that covers frequently asked questions (FAQs), such as how to find a mailing address, how to print a return label, or where to locate a brick-and-mortar store. You should use conversation analytics to review call transcripts for new FAQs to build and update the knowledge base.
- Using IVR and chatbots: When the knowledge base isn’t enough, an intelligent IVR or chatbot can handle routine requests and route more complex issues to a live agent.
9. Measure ROI and Cost Savings
To sustain any agent productivity program, you need to show the financial impact — to yourself and to leadership. Here are three ways to quantify it.
- Calculate the cost per contact: The cost per contact is calculated by dividing your total call center operating costs over a defined period by the total number of contacts handled. Include salaries, benefits, technology, utilities, and rent (if applicable). As agents become more productive — handling more calls with fewer transfers or escalations — this number should go down.
- Track revenue per agent: Revenue per agent is the total revenue attributable to the contact center in a period divided by the number of agents. Even if your center is viewed as a cost center, you may still be driving revenue through upsells, booked appointments, or improved retention. Conversation analytics tools like Invoca make it easier to connect calls to outcomes — and outcomes to revenue.
- Analyze training and retention ROI: Turnover is expensive. One industry source estimates that it costs approximately $20,800 to train and deploy a single call center agent, with an average agent turnover rate of around 38%. So, if you have 100 agents and you’re losing 38 a year, that means you’re spending roughly $800,000 annually just to maintain your staff. Reducing turnover into the mid-teens more than halves that cost, which makes ongoing agent training, coaching, and engagement efforts well worth the investment.
Improve Agent Productivity with Smarter Tools from Invoca
Improving agent productivity isn’t a one-time project — it’s an ongoing journey. Setting clear metrics and building a strategic program around people, processes, and technology is how you can sustain results over time. Invoca helps make that journey more effective with:
- PreSense, which delivers real-time insight into who’s calling and why, so agents can personalize the conversation and get to the issue faster
- Intelligent call routing, which reduces transfers by connecting callers to the right agent the first time for a smoother experience
- Conversation analytics captured at scale, which equip you with the real-world data you need to coach agents, spot gaps, and replicate top performance
- Automated AI call summaries, which generate succinct recaps (intent, interest, outcome) in real time and can populate notes in your CRM—reducing after-call work for agents.
Invoca also provides quality management capabilities to help ensure your agent productivity program stays on track. You can confidently measure progress and deliver the unbiased, targeted feedback every agent needs to become a top performer.
Additional Reading
Check out these additional resources to learn more about how using Invoca in your call center can improve agent productivity:
- Understanding Call Center Productivity: The Ultimate Guide
- How to Analyze Call Center Data to Improve Efficiency
- 10 Steps to Create a Better Call Center Environment
Are you ready to transform the performance of agents in your contact center with AI-powered conversation analytics? Book a demo with Invoca to see how our platform can help you improve agent productivity while enhancing customer experiences.
