Top 10 tips to improve agent productivity and efficiency

Today’s customers don’t want to wait for a response to their service inquiries. In fact, 66 percent expect a response within five minutes of contacting your team. This means that, to meet these rising expectations, your agents must work as productively and efficiently as possible.

But how do you improve agent productivity when your team is already working as hard as possible to keep up? The most successful companies aren’t working harder — they’re working smarter.

By using technology to streamline agent workloads and processes, companies can make their team’s lives easier. Not only that, but greater agent productivity and efficiency also lead to better service for your customers.

Follow along if you’re ready to learn how to improve agent productivity, as well as the benefits of using automation tools like Jotform to better serve your customers.

10 strategies to help your agents work more efficiently

For agents to handle more interactions per day (and be more effective while doing so), you need to ensure they have the proper tools and training. The following strategies can be applied to your operations to boost contact center efficiency.

1. Automate repetitive tasks

Repetitive tasks are among the core factors that deter agent productivity and efficiency. Answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), routing, and form intake are low-value, time-consuming tasks that leave your agents with less capacity to interact with customers with more complex issues.

To eliminate this bottleneck and improve call center productivity, you can introduce artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools. Chatbots and AI agents act as digital assistants to your team, boosting contact center efficiency by answering routine requests without involving an agent. This frees your people up to handle customer interactions that require a more personalized approach.

2. Centralize knowledge and resources

Agents don’t always know exactly how to handle every situation as it’s happening in real time. When customers ask complex or nuanced questions, your team may need to consult an internal file to determine the most appropriate response. The longer this process takes, the fewer interactions the agent can complete and the more likely a customer is to get frustrated.

When deciding how to improve agent productivity in call centers, one solution is to streamline how agents access answers, templates, and policies. Using a centralized digital knowledge base, along with tools like automation AI agents that can quickly retrieve this information, reduces the time required to handle complex inquiries.

This also improves agents’ morale. As well as increasing agent productivity and efficiency, simplifying the process leaves your team less fatigued.

3. Prioritize and triage smarter

Customers who experience long, drawn-out interactions that bounce from one agent to the next are more likely to become upset and form a negative perception of your customer support. That’s why it’s vital to connect them with the right agent the first time.

Using AI-based routing or tagging technology, your customers’ inquiries go to the agent with the answers they need straight away. Intelligent routing not only reduces decision fatigue caused by overly complex service issues but also frees up agents who aren’t the right fit for that customer to help other users with their requests.

4. Minimize context switching

The time agents spend switching between digital tools is wasted, yet many call centers still use segmented tech stacks that don’t integrate properly. Unifying your digital solutions into a single, harmonious workspace is an easy way to improve call center productivity.

Consider investing in customer service solutions that operate on a single system. If you have preferred tools that don’t fit under one umbrella, make sure your solutions integrate seamlessly so you can easily access data from anywhere without making manual transfers.

5. Enable real-time collaboration

When exploring how to improve agent productivity in a call center, another strategy could be to sharpen internal communication. To boost contact center efficiency, agents must be able to quickly escalate and share tickets with one another. Allowing agents to work together in real time cuts through the red tape that stands in the way of maximum efficiency and productivity.

Centralizing your team’s communication on a platform can enable users to work on tickets simultaneously to find the right solution. Ticket escalation, in particular, can be a common bottleneck for call centers — using an intelligent ticketing system can eliminate your team’s common roadblocks to efficient escalation practices.

6. Invest in comprehensive training

How well your team knows how to do their job will directly affect how quickly they can perform their duties. Unprepared agents will struggle to keep up with their workload, let alone help boost contact center productivity as a whole. This makes the effectiveness of your agent training program a central cog in your strategy.

Agents should be trained on the company’s expectations, standards, and processes, as well as on how to use the digital tools they’ll encounter daily. This training should be easy for agents to understand, including self-paced and multilingual options.

It’s also important that training isn’t a one-time process. Regular learning opportunities can keep agents sharp and improve their efficiency. This is especially true if you’re investing in evolving tools like AI and automation, which are frequently updated with new capabilities and standards.

7. Track and optimize workload distribution

When agent workloads aren’t manageable, productivity suffers. If your team is overworked and underresourced, you won’t be able to see agent performance improvements regardless of how much training you do. 

Using tools like workload dashboards, you can analyze the number of tasks each agent is assigned on a daily basis. If you discover that certain agents are overloaded while others have availability, you can distribute duties accordingly and increase the overall efficiency of your team. If you discover your entire team is overloaded, consider introducing automation tools to eliminate any repeatable tasks that may be unnecessarily hindering agent productivity and efficiency.

8. Set clear and realistic goals

If your team’s productivity goals are too lofty, you risk making your agents feel as though they’re unattainable. Agents who don’t feel like they can achieve the goals you set will be less motivated to try to be productive. Unclear goals can also leave your team unsure of how you even measure agent productivity in the first place, leading to misalignment on what constitutes good performance.

Setting clearly outlined, achievable goals offers your team a target to aim for and helps them feel capable of meeting expectations. Reinforcing this with rewards for achieving set goals can also boost employee morale and motivation.

9. Measure agent productivity and analyze performance

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. That’s why it’s essential to create a comprehensive performance evaluation system that helps you measure agent productivity across key metrics, like 

• Average handle time
• First response time
• Ticket volume
• Resolution rate

Tracking these metrics provides definitive insights into how effectively your team is achieving its goals. From there, you can find ways to drive agent performance improvement and provide clear, actionable guidance for your team to use in their everyday workflows.

10. Support agent well-being

Your team’s well-being is a contributing factor in their ability to work productively. When agents feel burned out, their work becomes less efficient. 

The workplace environment can directly influence how employees feel and, in turn, perform their jobs. Here’s how to improve agent productivity by improving your company culture:

• Create a mandated break time
• Facilitate opportunities to socialize
• Ensure workloads and schedules are fair
• Encourage a work-life balance
• Reward meeting performance goals

Agents who feel supported and in a reciprocal working relationship are more likely to strive for higher productivity levels. One way to support agents’ well-being is to provide them with tools that make their lives easier, such as Jotform AI Agents.

Improve your agent productivity with Jotform

Working smarter, not harder, begins with finding ways to minimize the busywork holding your team back. By using AI to improve agent productivity, you can defer this work to automated solutions like Jotform AI Agents. 

With Jotform’s user-friendly, no-code platform, you can easily create customized AI assistants that can be deployed across a wide range of roles, functions, and industries. But what is a chatbot solution like this used for, and what are AI agents exactly? 

There are many types of chatbots available, but AI agents specifically are powered by AI to assist your team — whether you work in e-commerce, healthcare, finance, or education. Using Jotform AI Agents, you can transform your online forms into dynamic conversational experiences or build chatbots from scratch to handle tasks that are holding back your team’s potential.

You can train your AI agents with the data you deem appropriate, then deploy them where you need them most. Jotform AI Agents can handle multiple tasks simultaneously, such as

• Collecting customer data
• Autofilling forms
• Answering FAQs

These AI assistants can also enhance the way your agents work. They can serve as a solution for quickly finding information in your knowledge base or intelligently routing requests — driving agent productivity and efficiency, both directly and indirectly.

Jotform AI Agents are intuitive, efficient, and engaging — offering powerful features that enable your team, including:

• Enhanced data integration: Keep your data clean and organized by automatically formatting responses to match your form’s layout.
• Personalization: Agent interactions adapt based on user input, ensuring a relevant journey for customers and employees alike.
• AI agent templates: With more than 7,000 available templates, you can implement AI agents fast — without the need to build from scratch.
• Scalability: Jotform AI Agents grow when you do, making it easy to handle an increasing volume of customer requests.

With the help of these AI-powered assistants, your team can unlock new levels of productivity and reduce the role that busywork plays in their day-to-day workflows.

Drive productivity with simplicity and smart operations

Achieving maximum productivity doesn’t require huge changes or motivational speeches. Making small adjustments to how your agents do their jobs can be just as effective. 

Start to improve agent productivity by identifying which workflows are taking up the most time — then determine if these can be automated using tools like Jotform AI Agents. Adding solutions like Jotform AI Agents to your service toolbelt can reduce your team’s manual effort and improve the overall agent experience. Best of all, you can get started for free today.