2025 Call Centre Productivity Guide: Must-Have Metrics

Calabrio explores different definitions of and approaches to contact centre productivity, discussing some tried-and-true best practices and cutting-edge tools, cutting through the noise to help you truly transform your call centre into a high-performing engine that fuels customer loyalty and growth.

Achieving maximum call centre productivity is anything but simple. For many leaders, it might often feel like a high-wire act. Between navigating changes in customer expectations, keeping up with rapid advances in technology, managing agent engagement and retention (and much more), sustaining a productive contact centre in 2025 is a dynamic balancing act.

How do you find that sweet spot between leveraging intelligent automation and nurturing the human connection that’s crucial to customer loyalty? How do you craft a winning big-picture strategy without losing sight of the granular details?

What Is Contact Centre Productivity, Exactly?

Call centre productivity measures the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your contact centre, focusing on how well agents utilize resources to achieve organizational goals.

In theory, contact centre productivity reflects the input (time, money, number of employees) required to drive desired output (resolved cases, completed sales, etc.).

In reality, call centre productivity is – or should be – about much more than just how many calls are handled in how much time.

That’s because, to understand how effective contact centres are, productivity must be treated as a multifaceted concept that includes both quantitative measures, such as call volume and resolution rates, and qualitative factors, like customer satisfaction and agent performance. To truly understand and improve productivity, you must consider:

• Efficiency: How quickly and accurately agents handle interactions.
• Effectiveness: How well agents resolve customer issues and meet objectives.
• Customer Satisfaction: How satisfied customers are with the interactions.
• Agent Performance: How well agents adhere to schedules and contribute to operational tasks.

How to Calculate Call Centre Productivity: What Are the Best Ways to Measure Productivity?

Productivity is a key indicator of success in your call centre. But because it can encompass many different factors, it can also be one of the most challenging goals to measure and optimize.

Ultimately, how to calculate productivity will depend on your particular organization’s objectives. Below, we break down some of the best KPIs for measuring agent productivity as well as overall contact centre productivity.

Measuring Call Centre Agent Performance: Key Agent Productivity Metrics

While overall contact centre productivity is important to track as well, it’s the performance of your agents that ultimately drives results.

To get a clear picture of individual contributions and identify areas for improvement, focus on these key agent productivity metrics:

• First Call Resolution (FCR): Measures the percentage of customer issues resolved during the first interaction.
• Average Handle Time (AHT): Tracks the average duration of a customer interaction.
• Average Speed of Answer (ASA): Measures how quickly calls are answered.
• After-Call Work (ACW): Tracks the time agents spend on post-call tasks.
• Occupancy Rate: Indicates the percentage of time agents are actively engaged in call-related activities.
• Agent Utilization: Measures the percentage of time agents handle customer interactions.
• Adherence to Schedule: Tracks how well agents follow their assigned schedules.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Reflects how satisfied customers are with the service received.

The ideal key performance indicators (KPIs) for your strategy depend on specific goals and priorities. For instance, if your team offers high-quality service but often struggles with long calls, reducing AHT may be critical to improving call centre productivity.

Tracking these metrics helps you identify which aspects of agents’ performance need improvement, such as communication skills, time management, and script adherence.

Other Ways of Measuring Call Centre Productivity

While the above metrics focus on agent performance, overall contact centre productivity can also be tracked with high-level metrics like:

• Cost per Contact: This metric calculates the average cost of handling a single customer interaction. Lowering this cost while maintaining service quality is a key objective.
• Revenue per Agent: This metric measures the revenue generated by each agent. It’s particularly relevant for sales-focused contact centres.

Meanwhile, although it’s typically advisable to attempt to capture agent productivity in a single metric, some organizations do calculate overall productivity by striking a balance between call volume and successful resolutions.

Here’s an example of a potential call centre productivity formula:

Agent Productivity (%) = (Total Calls Handled x FCR) ÷ Total Time Spent

This formula defines a productive agent as someone who handles a high number of calls and resolves them on the first contact in the shortest amount of time.

It’s a clear indicator of call centre efficiency but notice that it excludes relevant factors like CSAT scores and the complexity of calls handled.

So, remember that calculating productivity also requires capturing the entire picture of how well your agents deal with common customer issues.

How to Improve Call Centre Agent Productivity

Improving productivity requires a holistic approach that addresses both individual agent needs and overall operational efficiency.

Prioritize Agent Engagement and Build a Productive Call Centre Culture

Engaged agents are more productive, provide better service, and contribute to a positive work environment.

To foster better agent engagement, don’t just create a productivity strategy – develop a plan to support a winning call centre culture, where agents feel valued and empowered to perform at their best.

Encourage open communication and recognize contributions during consistent meetings with individual agents and entire teams. Meanwhile, don’t underestimate the importance of work-life balance.

Burnout can quickly derail even the most dedicated team, so encourage healthy habits and consider implementing tools like agent self-scheduling software to give agents more control and flexibility.

Establish a Clear Path for Agent Development

A critical component of engaging your agents and unlocking their potential is setting clear expectations around – and investing in – their long-term professional development.

A clear path for growth not only motivates agents but also makes it easier to equip them with the skills needed to navigate the complexities of customer interactions.

Setting out this path should begin during onboarding, setting the stage for continuous learning and advancement.

Provide regular opportunities for skill development, clearly communicate career paths and requirements, and utilize contact centre quality management tools to track progress and identify areas for improvement.

By nurturing your agents’ growth, you’ll drive improved contact centre productivity that’s also sustainable.

Fuel Engagement and Performance With Contact Centre Gamification

Gamification is a proven technique for boosting engagement and performance in the contact centre. By incorporating game mechanics like leaderboards, points, and badges into daily tasks and goals, you can create a more stimulating and rewarding work environment.

In fact, according to one study, employees experience a 48% engagement increase, on average, with a gamified work experience.

Eliminate Bottlenecks and Automate Manual Processes

The modern contact centre is a hotbed of innovation, and technology is key to unlocking new levels of productivity.

By embracing automation and intelligent tools, you can eliminate time-consuming manual processes and streamline workflows.

Many teams are turning to the latest contact centre AI solutions to drive greater productivity and efficiency.

According to the latest data from Deloitte, 1 in 6 contact centres have already deployed Generative AI capabilities, while another 42% plan to do so in the year ahead.

Automate Scoring of 100% of Your Calls

Using AI to supplement or replace manual call reviewing is one area where AI is already having an incredible impact.

With automated quality management tools, contact centres can ditch random sampling and instead evaluate 100% of interactions, unlocking:

• Faster feedback: AI-driven solutions provide real-time feedback, allowing agents to improve their performance after each call.
• Consistency: AI-based evaluations ensure that bias is eliminated from evaluation and score interactions according to consistent criteria.
• Motivation: Ongoing feedback contributes to a better understanding of agents’ strengths and fuels initiatives for boosting motivation, such as flexible work schedules, promotions, and bonuses.
• Mapping training needs: Based on unbiased call reviews, managers can quickly identify opportunities for improvement and help agents set new goals, like improving communication skills, product knowledge, or conflict resolution.

Leverage Analytics for Consistent Evaluation

Optimizing agent performance requires going beyond individual call evaluations. To maximize productivity, teams need a comprehensive view of performance metrics – as well as the ability to dive deep into granular performance metrics with tools like speech and desktop analytics.

With call centre analytics software powered by AI, you can keep track of productivity KPIs through real-time dashboards and reporting, so you can better:

• Evaluate agents with above-average AHT, which may indicate difficulties with adherence to scripts or call protocols
• Detect agents consistently exceeding high after-call work time, potentially pointing to a need for additional training on post-call tasks or an opportunity for automation
• Identify high transfer rates from a single agent, which could be a sign of a lack of confidence in handling specific topics or inefficient call routing

Analyse Customer Sentiment for In-depth Insights

Customer sentiment analysis is a powerful tool that extracts insights into agent productivity from qualitative data you collect from interactions. With the right sentiment analysis tools, you can identify:

• Reasons for high or low scores
• Lack of clear communication or empathy
• Use of inappropriate language
• Good examples of problem-solving to inspire the team
• Compliance violations
• Causes of long wait times

These insights provide a deeper understanding of the most frequent issues agents deal with and how efficiently they handle customer inquiries.

Use them to create training programs, provide feedback, and tailor strategies to address gaps that hold your team’s productivity back.

Invest in Self-Service

Empowering customers to find solutions on their own is a win-win for both customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

By leveraging chatbot technology and other self-service options to automate simple inquiries and provide readily available information, you cater to customer needs while optimizing your contact centre’s resources.

Ensure that AI-powered chatbots can handle a wide range of routine requests with the help of chatbot analytics tools, allowing your agents to dedicate their expertise to more demanding interactions.

Simplify Scheduling

Efficient scheduling is the backbone of a well-oiled contact centre. By leveraging advanced forecasting and scheduling tools, you can optimize staffing levels to meet fluctuating customer demands.

These tools allow you to anticipate peaks and valleys in call volume, ensuring you have the right number of agents, with the right skills, available at the right time.

This not only minimizes customer wait times but also maximizes agent utilization, leading to a more productive and cost-effective operation.

Leverage Leading Workforce Engagement Management Software

The journey to peak contact centre productivity requires a holistic approach, encompassing everything from agent engagement and streamlined workflows to data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement.

Reviewed by: Megan Jones