Productivity is a major concern for call centers, making it crucial to measure and plan ways to increase it. High agent productivity rates can enable call centers to offer a better customer experience, thereby increasing profits. Goals should be clear and precise when being set. Productivity is about how quickly an agent can complete the assigned tasks while giving the best results.

With accurate productivity scores, call centers can determine whether they have hired the right number of employees and that their productivity yields expected returns to the company.  Productive agents tend to take less time to serve customers with satisfactory responses, compared to unproductive agents.

Looking at all the benefits of higher productivity in agents, here are five tips on how to measure and improve it:

1. Measure the Agent’s Productivity: When measuring productivity, divide the total number of output hours of the agent by the total number of input hours and then multiply it by 100. Output hours refer to the amount of time the agent spends speaking or chatting to customers and other required tasks. Whereas, the input hours refer to the working hours of the agent. This productivity score helps the supervisor to understand how efficiently the work is done by any specific agent, which further helps to focus more on the lower producing agents.
2. Withdrawal Rate: Helps to figure out how well the agents are handling customer interactions. To calculate the withdrawal rate, divide the number of failed calls or chats by the total number of requests, and then multiply it by 100. Failed calls or chats refer to instances where the customer hangs up the call or exits the chat as they are not satisfied with the agent’s response. Agents with high withdrawal rates need more attention and special training needs to be provided to improve.
3. Average Talk Time: To calculate the average talk time for an agent, divide the total time spent by the agent talking or chatting to customers by the total number of requests. A low average talk time depicts that agents are taking more requests and being more productive. The supervisor should plan to decrease the average talk time while maintaining customer satisfaction.
4. Average Waiting Time: For calculating the average waiting time, divide the total wait time by the total number of requests. The goal should be to decrease the average waiting time for each customer. The longer a customer needs to wait, the poorer the customer experience. Try to identify the factors that increase waiting time and work on resolving them.
5. Summarize: The supervisor, after calculating all the scores, should summarize them to yield better results. It takes more than just numbers to increase productivity, so work on the factors which can increase or decrease the scores, as required.

The supervisors can calculate all the above-mentioned scores manually or integrate the quality monitoring tool like QEval to automate the calculations. The tool is built such that it gives the real-time analysis for all the agents’ performance and helps to predict future progress for them.