12 Proven Ways to Improve Agent Productivity in 2026

When as many as 57% of customer care leaders expect customer service demand to keep climbing, you can’t ignore the importance of improving your agent productivity. When you think about the foundation of your business, your mind probably jumps to your product or the benefits it offers. But when 70% of customers say they wouldn’t even consider a brand again after just two bad experiences, customer support agents are what truly hold your business together.

If you want a productive and efficient team, you need clear systems in place to improve agent productivity. That’s what you’ll learn in this guide on contact center agent productivity and effectiveness.

Keep reading to learn:

• How to define clear productivity metrics
• What type of software agents need most in their day-to-day work
• Real-world examples of improved agent productivity 
• Practical ways to eliminate busy work

12 practical ways to improve agent productivity and your call center efficiency

When your team feels appreciated, has the right tools to improve productivity, and isn’t blocked by constant obstacles, they become more effective and committed to their work. Let’s cut to the chase and dive into 12 ways to improve your agents’ productivity, so you can build a happier team and keep customers coming back.

1. Define achievable metrics

Productivity starts with clarity, and to achieve that clarity, your team needs concrete steps and goals to follow. If agents don’t know what “good” looks like, they’ll default to speed. And speed alone isn’t productivity and can even be counterproductive.

Strong metrics balance efficiency and quality. Some of the main call center productivity metrics include average handle time, first-call resolution rate, service level, and more. Take a look at the main metrics and industry benchmarks.

Call center productivity metrics	Benchmark
AWT	20–40 seconds
AHT	5–8 minutes
FCR	70–80%
CAR	2–5%
SL	80% of calls are answered within 20 seconds
CPC	$2.50–$5.00 for inbound, $6–$12 for outbound
CSAT	80–90% is strong; above 90% is excellent
Agent utilization rate	75–85%, with 90%+ being at risk of burnout
Agent turnover rate	<25%

Treat these as guidelines, as every business and call or contact center has unique goals. When you define your goals, you can move to setting appropriate KPIs. Take a look at the 9 key call center productivity metrics to follow.

2. Develop training for new and existing agents

Contact center training should be an ongoing process. This way, your team feels like they can always learn and improve, instead of trying to lock in all the information in the first few weeks.

New agents need a structured ramp-up, so they’re not guessing their way through tickets. Existing agents need refreshers and updates as products evolve. Strategic and continuous training is rewarding not only for your team but also for the business. Research shows that 80% of employees would much rather stay with the same company if it provided ongoing training. 

Tips to establish a consistent training routine:

• Create a structured onboarding plan: Use a clear 30–60–90-day ramp-up plan with milestones and performance benchmarks. Define the steps and goals each agent has to achieve within 30, 60, and 90 days to provide more clarity.
• Centralize training resources: Maintain one accessible hub for SOPs, scripts, product updates, and recorded examples. Your team should have access to these resources at every stage of their development. Otherwise, they may hesitate out of fear of making mistakes and avoid tasks they’re not confident handling.
• Schedule short, regular sessions: Hold weekly 15–30-minute micro-trainings to reinforce skills and introduce updates. You can use recent calls or text interactions to base training on real-world examples.
• Use real performance reviews: Review actual calls or tickets to highlight strengths and areas for call center improvement. A great way to make this easier is to have auto QA tools in place. They evaluate 100% of interactions, so you can assess your team more accurately.
• Link training to KPIs: Measure the impact through CSAT, FCR, AHT, and QA scores to demonstrate results and keep track of everyone’s progress.
• Leverage peer mentorship: Every team usually has “natural leaders” — people who are enthusiastic and motivated. They tend to be more eager to try new working methods and technologies and pass this information on to their teammates. Pair these agents with newer team members to accelerate development. 

Protect dedicated training time: Block learning time on the calendar and treat it as a priority, not an afterthought.

3. Use workforce management software

You can’t improve productivity if you’re constantly understaffed or overstaffed. Both are expensive. Call center workforce management software helps forecast ticket volume and align staffing with demand. That reduces chaos and burnout.

Let’s take a common example of a contact center that experiences support volume spikes every Monday morning. Even when the team is struggling to keep up, schedules are built evenly across the week. Mondays become stressful, queues grow, and response times double. By Wednesday, agents are idle. When you have the right tools to predict demand spikes, you can distribute your workforce more strategically so no one is overwhelmed during peak times and no one is left sitting with no work.

4. Identify loopholes and bottlenecks

Most productivity problems aren’t agent effectiveness problems, but process inefficiencies. Look for steps that repeatedly slow resolution. That might be approval layers, unclear ownership, or missing documentation.

For example, Johnsonville, a well-known food manufacturer, had data scattered across channels, chats, documents, and other sources, making it difficult to systemize it and use it to improve agent performance. 

It wasn’t until they discovered Capacity Answer Engine®, a feature that unifies and searches information where it already lives while respecting access permissions and keeping sensitive content secure. Instead of agents spending hours browsing through endless documentation, the Answer Engine® cites its sources and points directly to the original document. As a result, the company saves time and helps agents focus.

5. Eliminate busywork and repetitive tasks

If agents are doing repetitive administrative tasks, you’re wasting skilled labor. Tasks like data entry, post-interaction summaries, updating customer details, and similar work can and should be automated.

A great place to start is to conduct regular workflow audits to identify low-value tasks, duplicate data entry, and unnecessary approval steps. If a task doesn’t directly improve the customer experience or compliance, challenge its existence.

The next step is to automate repetitive and manual tasks as much as possible. A great example of improved agent productivity is Bank of America and its virtual assistant, Erica. As they say on their website, clients have spent more than 18.7 million hours conversing with Erica. More than 98% of users find the information they need through this simple self-service option. As a result, they reduced calls to the IT service desk by 50% and significantly increased team productivity.

The right AI automation tools have no problem handling routine confirmations, tagging, status changes, and common responses. 

6. Deflect tier-1 inquiries

If you asked your team what tasks they spend the most time on, we can guarantee that most of them would say it’s repetitive FAQs and procedures like:

• Delivery updates
• Product or service details
• Confirmations
• Account verifications

See a pattern? Most of these workflows can be automated. Tier-1 issues are predictable and repeatable, and in most cases, don’t require a person.

You can think about it this way: if 35–40% of your tickets are “Where is my order?”, you don’t have a support capacity problem. You have a visibility problem. Add a real-time order tracking page, and that entire category of tickets drops. Deflection reserves agents for complex problems and gives your customers convenient self-service options to handle inquiries without waiting.

7. Offer self-service to agents, too

Agents lose time when they have to hunt for answers or find the latest update when an impatient customer is waiting on the other side of the line. An internal knowledge base, clear documentation, and fast search tools reduce hesitation and escalations.

Some possible self-service options for agent effectiveness:

Self-service option	What it is
Knowledge base	Searchable articles, FAQs, and step-by-step guides that let agents find information quickly.
AI Chatbot	Automated chat that answers common questions and guides agents, even on the spot. AI-powered agent assist is also a useful tool for real-time call center coaching.
Interactive troubleshooter	Step-by-step diagnostic flow that asks questions and recommends specific solutions, so even newer agents can do more technical tasks without supervision.
Video tutorials	Short how-to videos that visually walk customers and your agents through product features or fixes can be a great way to refresh knowledge.
Status page	Page showing system uptime, outages, and maintenance updates to reduce inbound inquiries and keep your team up to date.

Make information easy to find, and the resolution speed will increase naturally.

8. Suggest responses and follow-ups with AI

According to Gartner, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues by 2029. But it doesn’t mean that AI is here replace your team. Instead, the focus is on eliminating the busy work and assisting your team. 

AI-powered systems can:

• Draft replies
• Suggest next steps
• Surface related knowledge articles
• Generate post-call notes
• Give real-time tips and AI-powered suggestions

Agents still review and personalize, but don’t start from scratch. For example, instead of typing a refund explanation from memory, AI generates a first draft in seconds. The agent edits it for tone and sends it. That saves minutes per ticket, which adds up over hundreds of interactions.

9. Make information easy to find

Even the best agents slow down if systems are messy. If your team has to scroll through mile-long documentation every time they need to find a quick detail, they’re wasting time.

If you centralize:

• Policies
• Product updates
• Escalation paths
• Latest insights

You can speed up your team’s work and make it easier for them to concentrate. Every time agents have to stop helping a customer to look for information, it becomes harder to focus and continue the conversation.

If agents need to check three different tools to answer one question, you’ve built inefficiency into the workflow.

PepsiCo offers a great example of how even the largest enterprises can centralize and unify their data. The food and beverage giant turned to Capacity and deployed the Answer Engine®. After unifying corporate data, the Answer Engine® can search millions of pages across first- and third-party systems to find answers to employee questions in seconds — no generic FAQ links or pages and pages of documentation. As a result, PepsiCo saves 5,000 hours per year, boosts agent productivity, and improves its customer service.

10. Celebrate wins and analyze mistakes

Productivity isn’t just about checking boxes, but also about how your team feels emotionally and psychologically at work. When agents feel recognized, they stay engaged. When mistakes are analyzed constructively, performance improves.

Think about this example: an agent handles a complicated churn-risk customer and saves the account. If you ignore it, that effort feels invisible. The more these situations happen, the less engaged this agent feels, which can lead to a lack of motivation or even quitting. Recognize it publicly, and you reinforce the behaviors you want repeated.

At the same time, review mistakes without blame. Ask, “What broke in the process?” instead of “Who messed up?”

However, when your team grows, you need extra hands (or tools) to help you provide the same attention. Agent coaching softwareis a great option that can assist your team in real time, track their wins, and help avoid mistakes.

11. Create clear escalation paths

When agents don’t know when or how to escalate, two bad things happen: they either escalate too quickly or wait too long, hurting productivity.

A clear escalation framework defines:

• What qualifies for escalation
• Who owns each category
• Expected turnaround times

For example, an agent encounters a technical bug but isn’t sure if it’s a known issue. They ping three different Slack channels and wait for replies. The customer waits too. If there were a documented “Bug Escalation Process” with a direct intake form and a defined SLA, that ticket would move immediately instead of sitting in limbo.

12. Reduce context switching

Every time an agent switches tools, tabs, or systems, productivity drops. It doesn’t feel dramatic in the moment, but it adds up.

Support teams often juggle:

• A CRM
• A ticketing system
• A billing platform
• Internal chat
• A knowledge base

If those systems don’t integrate, agents spend real time stitching information together. Customers notice when context is lost. In fact, 79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments.

To answer a refund question, an agent might check the ticketing system, then open the billing tool, then search Slack for a policy update, and then check the CRM for account history. That’s five systems for one answer. Now multiply that by 60 tickets per day per agent.

Integrations, unified dashboards, and consolidated views reduce friction. When agents can see everything they need in one place, they move faster without feeling rushed.

Empower your team with tools designed for productivity

Your team shapes your customer experience, brand loyalty, and reputation. With the right methods and tools, you can improve agent productivity and support your team at every step.

If you’re looking for solutions to improve your team’s productivity and automate customer support tasks, you can’t miss Capacity. It offers agent assist features like auto QA, real-time suggestions, post-call summaries, information transfer, unified knowledge search, and more.

On top of that, Capacity connects your knowledge once and uses it across the entire customer journey — chat, voice, email, QA, and analytics. You don’t need to worry about training multiple AI tools on the same data when you can replace four to five vendors with one fully automated solution. That means consistent, accurate answers across every channel.

Calculate your potential savings with Capacity, and if you like what you see, book a demo.

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