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How to Improve Call Center Agent Performance: Key Strategies and Tools

Hudson Muchmore

June 5, 2025

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Key Takeaways

Make sure agents are trained well and are encouraged to keep learning.
Choose the best tools and technology to help agents be effective.
Use AI for immediate help and better results.
Set up a workplace where employees are encouraged to always learn and improve.
Ongoily check and review metrics to find areas you can improve
Give agents the right information and let them make important decisions.
Encourage an environment where people share their thoughts and ideas.

Overview of Call Center Agent Performance

Because you are in charge of a call center, you realize that how well your agents perform is necessary for both excellent customer service and meeting business objectives. It affects important numbers like the average time it takes to handle a call, the percentage of calls answered correctly on the first try and how happy customers are.

Working on ways to know the call center agent performance scorecard more effectively will improve the business, its results and how happy customers are. You need to address training, tools, work environment and ongoing progress together.

Understanding Agent Productivity

To make performance better, you should first look at how productive your agents are. This is about your reps performing their roles well, providing excellent service and still meeting company goals. Important data points are:

The percentage of calls answered and dealt with completely.
Active call time compared to the entire time you work
AHT is the overall time your agents spend on calls, including talking, being on hold and their follow-up tasks.
The First Call Resolution (FCR) Rate shows the percentage of calls that were solved during the first call.

As a result of following these, you can understand how well your team and individuals are doing which helps you direct your efforts for improvement, individual and team performance to guide your improvement efforts.

Key Strategies to Enhance Performance

So what are the most effective ways to improve agent performance in a call center? Based on How to improve agent performance in a call center? These are the strategies you can successfully use for managing contact centers for more than 15 years:

Arrange thorough training when people join and give them opportunities to develop further
Put in place a quality assurance system to watch over and advise on call center performance.
Make certain that each agent and the whole team have specific goals they can measure.
Route customers to the agent who has the needed set of skills.
Give immediate advice and feedback to your team during and after they deal with customers
Support a good work atmosphere by giving agents a voice and encouraging open communication.
Give agents the authority to decide within set guidelines so that problems can be handled efficiently.
Introduce games into the workplace to help agents feel more motivated to meet their goals.

The main thing is to work on hiring, training, coaching, goal-setting, technology and culture all at the same time. Not following any step will mean you won’t get good results.

Top Tools to Boost Call Center Agent Productivity

Providing your agents with the proper equipment is important for them to do their best. These are some of the best ways I suggest to help agents be as productive as possible:

Talkdesk: This cloud-based call center software includes skill-based call routing, real-time data reporting, AI support for agents and easy connections to common CRM systems. It enables agents to take care of interactions smoothly using voice, email, chat and social platforms.
NICE inContact CXone: CXone is a highly developed cloud platform for customer experience. It makes use of omnichannel routing, workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence. Using real-time interaction tips and agent-driven screen sharing allows agents to handle more issues at the first contact.
LiveAgent: LiveAgent is a all-in-one cloud contact center platform that does not complicate the user experience. As well as issuing tickets, it allows customers to chat, call and access a knowledge base. Having the agent dashboard and gamification options is very helpful for keeping reps motivated and productive.
Genesys Cloud: Genesys Cloud is a cloud-based system offering tools to handle omni channel routing, engage employees with workforce management, help agents with AI and analyze speech and text. Screen pops and whisper coaching make handling customer interactions smoother and faster for agents.
Assembled: Assembled was built to address the needs of support teams in the modern workforce management landscape. It makes it easy to plan, schedule, manage in real time and track the performance of agents. Agents stay active through shifts they swap and overtime bids.
Klaus: this is a conversation review and quality assurance platform used by the best support teams. Managers can use it to review many types of customer support interactions, give specific feedback and measure the performance of their agents. In this way, agents develop their skills and their work performance improves.

Keep in mind which channels are important which tools should be combined, your reporting needs and your budget when selecting tools to make agents more efficient. Involve agents as much as you can to make adoption and impact stronger. Choosing the right set of tools can greatly enhance how well your call center works and the quality of your service. I prefer using Talkdesk because it does everything a help desk should and Klaus for managing the quality of support responses.

Leverage AI for Real-Time Agent Assistance

One of the most exciting developments to improve call center performance metrics is AI-poweOne breakthrough in raising call center metrics has been AI-driven real-time help for agents. You can gain benefits by doing this:

Immediately show the customer knowledge articles that match their question.
Immediately support the team by offering call script and compliance advice.
Check how customers feel and teach agents how to modify their communication style.
Guide agents through handling complicated requests with easy-to-follow steps.
Automate tasks after a call such as summarizing your notes and updating the necessary systems.

When AI is integrated into agents, they can quickly and efficiently handle calls which helps reduce AHT and boost both FCR and CSAT. It makes it possible for agents to have their own personal assistant.

Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

While training, tools and processes are important, the foundation for improving call center While training, using tools and defining processes are necessary, your culture is the key to knowing how to train a call center agent to perform better. You must encourage employees to keep learning and improving. Some tips:

Check KPIs and listen to calls often to discover where your agents can improve
Motivate agents to suggest ways to improve how work is done and the tools used.
Schedule team sessions to work on skills or knowledge everyone needs to improve
You can use mystery shopping to fairly assess how well services are provided.
Implement changes fast after receiving feedback and see if they make a difference.

Getting agents involved in identifying both challenges and potential answers is very important. The people answering calls daily are likely to have strong insights.

FAQs About Improving Call Center Agent Performance

How do you calculate call center agent productivity?

The productivity of an agent is determined by: (What is produced / What is consumed) x 100. The results from customer service are things like calls that have been handled, issues that have been settled and sales that have been completed. The input is the time spent actively working on the job.

What are the most important metrics for agent performance?

Although there are a lot of KPIs, I recommend paying attention to these:

Time it Takes to Resolve
How many calls are solved the first time a customer calls?
Score measuring Customer Satisfaction
Sticking to a Schedule

Conclusion and Next Steps

Knowing how to improve call center agent performance involves having proper hiring, training, coaching, using the right tools and changing the company culture. Improving agents, choosing clear targets, using AI and advanced systems and constantly optimizing will result in better productivity and a better level of service.

Begin by checking where your team stands on important KPIs such as AHT and FCR. Figure out which skills and tools you lack the most. Then decide which 2-3 strategies and tools from the list you can apply during the next four weeks.

The most important thing is to tackle it step by step, favoring action. Minor changes, if maintained, will slowly lead to improvements in how well agents perform and how the business grows. So go ahead and get started right now!