To improve agent productivity, remove avoidable work from the support workflow while preserving accurate resolutions and sustainable capacity. Faster typing, shorter conversations or more closed tickets do not necessarily mean customers receive useful help.
This guide shows how to investigate bottlenecks, use automation carefully, coach practical skills, improve workspaces and measure the result. The examples are original and illustrative. Adapt the process to your channels, case complexity and staffing model.
Define productivity in terms of useful output
Productivity relates output to an input. One team measure is qualifying resolved issues divided by included staffed hours. Define what qualifies as a resolution, how duplicate tickets and shared work are counted, and which hours are included. A ticket status is only one source of evidence about an outcome.
For an illustrative team review, 30 qualifying issues resolved across 10 included staffed hours produces 3 issues per hour. That is arithmetic, not an industry target. If the numerator counts distinct issues, do not change it to every agent reply halfway through the comparison.
State whether the denominator includes breaks, training, meetings, documentation and mentoring. A view based only on active handling time answers a different question from output across all scheduled time. Track necessary non-ticket work rather than treating it as a productivity failure.
Separate productivity from utilization and occupancy. These time ratios depend on defined work and availability states. More of the day spent handling contacts does not establish better results. For detailed metric ownership and definitions, see our support KPI guide.
The business question should be concrete: can the team handle relevant demand with accurate help, manageable waiting and an appropriate cost? Do not assume that a reduced handle time automatically improves satisfaction or revenue.
Find the bottleneck before buying another tool
Review representative cases with the agents who handled them. Follow the work from arrival through diagnosis, action, handoff and completion. Separate active effort from time waiting for a customer, approval or another team.
| Observed work | Possible cause | Change to investigate |
|---|---|---|
| Repeated searching | Answers use different terms or are out of date. | Improve findability, examples and knowledge ownership. |
| Re-entering information | Disconnected records or unnecessary fields. | Remove duplicate entry or test an approved integration. |
| Repeated transfers | Routing lacks necessary context or skills. | Clarify routing criteria and complete handoffs. |
| Waiting for routine decisions | Missing access or unclear authority. | Confirm permissions and permitted decisions. |
| Same problem returns | Incomplete resolution or unresolved product issue. | Inspect the customer outcome and underlying cause. |
This is a hypothesis table, not a diagnosis of your team. Verify the cause through cases, time observations and agent feedback. A long conversation may be appropriate for a difficult issue; a quick conversation may generate more follow-up work.
Start with one recurring, addressable bottleneck. Identify the person who can change it and define an outcome to review. Avoid launching new routing, AI, training and targets together if you need to understand which change helped.
Use AI and automation for specific, reviewed work
Clarify routing and repetitive tasks
Route using relevant issue type, urgency, language, access and skills where your tools support those rules. Include a fallback for unknown or incorrect classifications. A specialist queue with insufficient capacity can simply move the delay.
Automate a stable repetitive task only after its inputs and exceptions are understood. Examples to investigate include copying an approved field between records, selecting an applicable reply template or generating a draft case summary. Log failures and keep a route to correct the output.
Zendesk’s intelligent triage documentation, for example, describes topic and sentiment fields, confidence and correction behavior. Verify current tool capabilities and configuration rather than assuming all classifications or channels update identically.
Give agents assistance they can verify
An agent-assist tool can be useful when it surfaces relevant knowledge or drafts material that an agent can review. Check the proposed answer against the customer’s context, current documentation and permitted actions before sending it. Preserve source links for suggestions and a feedback route for errors.
The primary study Generative AI at Work examined a conversational assistant in one support setting and found differing effects across experience and skill groups. That is a reason to evaluate your deployment by task and agent context, rather than apply a universal productivity multiplier.
Measure review time, incorrect suggestions, escalation and customer outcomes alongside speed. Give new users training in verification and exception handling. Stop or narrow an automation that creates unsupported answers or more rework, even if draft generation is fast.
Build training around a bottleneck and a decision
Choose a specific skill from the case review: finding the current procedure, diagnosing a permission problem, explaining an unfamiliar step or preparing a specialist handoff. Combine product knowledge with communication and decision-making practice.
Use a sanitized case, show a worked approach, then ask the agent to apply it to a different example. Keep guidance available during real work. A short focused module can address one task; peer discussion can reveal exceptions and gaps in the reference material.
Tailor coaching to observed needs rather than assigning everyone the same course. Ask what made the case difficult before choosing a remedy. Training will not repair missing access, an overloaded specialist queue or a broken product.
Practical coaching plan Observed case and useful output: Decision or skill to practice: Reference material and prerequisites: Worked example and agent exercise: Feedback on accuracy, explanation and handoff: Guidance or access that needs correction: Follow-up cases and review date:
Keep a knowledgeable person available for questions, with capacity for mentoring. When product or policy changes, update the reference and practice the changed decision. Track application in later cases rather than treating course attendance as evidence of improved productivity.
Our customer service training manual provides a broader training structure; use this coaching plan for the bottleneck you are addressing now.
Improve the physical and digital workspace
Review equipment, furniture, working conditions and the actual job with agents, including remote and hybrid staff. HSE’s workstation assessment guidance considers the whole workstation, the work and individual requirements. Use an appropriate assessment process rather than assuming a particular chair or standing desk will increase output.
Inspect noise, call quality, lighting and opportunities for focused work. Provide a practical way to collaborate without making every complex task interruptible. Check that headsets, connectivity and necessary tools work reliably in the setting where agents use them.
For digital work, map the information needed in a case. Remove unnecessary fields and duplicated entry. Make the customer history, current instructions and escalation route easy to reach. Confirm that integrations preserve correct permissions and records before relying on them.
A visual explanation may help when text cannot show a particular state. Screendesk provides customer recording links and helpdesk-connected video workflows. Use a relevant recording to add context, with a text alternative and appropriate handling of sensitive information. It does not replace the underlying case ownership or create a universal agent desktop.
Where diagnostic capture is appropriate, check which browser details or console/network evidence your approved tools can collect and what must be excluded. More captured information is useful only when it supports the investigation safely.
Use a balanced review instead of a volume leaderboard
Compare agents or periods only after considering issue complexity, channel, role, tenure and non-ticket responsibilities. An agent taking escalations or mentoring colleagues may close fewer cases while contributing valuable work.
| View | Measure to define | Companion check |
|---|---|---|
| Output | Qualifying resolved issues per included staffed hour. | Case mix, collaboration credit and outcome accuracy. |
| Handling effort | Included handling and after-contact time per contact. | Repeat contacts, transfers and complexity. |
| Customer experience | Satisfaction or task effort with a specified interaction. | Respondent counts, coverage and qualitative comments. |
| Cost | Included service cost per stated output unit. | Implementation, review and support overhead. |
| Sustainability | Workload, schedule pressure and agent feedback. | Break coverage, mentoring and unresolved backlog. |
For voice, define whether handle time includes talk, hold and after-call work. For concurrent chat, summed contact durations can exceed elapsed agent time; do not silently treat them as interchangeable staffed hours. Use the tool’s definition and label local adjustments.
Share measures with agents, explain what they mean and invite corrections to the records. Recognize careful diagnosis, useful escalation and improved knowledge as well as appropriate resolutions. If using badges or points, avoid rewards that encourage premature closure or unfair comparisons between unlike queues.
A balanced review should lead to support or a process change. Our customer service scorecard guide covers structured quality evaluation alongside these operational measures.
Protect sustainable capacity and agent wellbeing
Examine workload and work design, not only an individual’s ability to cope. HSE’s Management Standards cover demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. Those areas provide a useful structure for discussing pressure and practical improvements with staff.
Plan coverage for breaks, coaching and unexpected demand. HSE’s screen-work guidance discusses breaks and changes of activity as part of work planning. Do not treat a full schedule of continuous contact handling as the definition of productive work.
Give agents a clear route for difficult interactions, workload concerns and decisions beyond their authority. Review recurring excessive demand with operations owners. Employee assistance or personal stress-management resources can be useful, but they do not fix an unmanageable queue by themselves.
Offer meaningful recognition, opportunities to build skills and realistic career discussions. Where schedules allow flexibility, make coverage and decision rules transparent. Protect feedback about working conditions from being interpreted as poor motivation.
Pilot a change and check the full effect
Choose one workflow, document the baseline and introduce a specific change with an owner. Define eligibility, observation period, review criteria and the conditions for stopping or revising it.
Agent productivity pilot Workflow, case mix and observed bottleneck: Change, owner and dependencies: Output unit and included hours: Quality, rework and customer-experience checks: Training, review and implementation effort: Agent feedback and capacity guardrails: Comparison, other changes and limitations: Review date and decision:
For an illustrative knowledge-search pilot, improve one frequently used article and its search terms. Review time spent finding the answer, application accuracy and later repeat contacts for relevant cases. Include the work needed to maintain the article. Do not assume fewer searches mean customers received the correct help.
Compare similar cases and record staffing changes, incidents or demand shifts. A before-and-after change can inform the next decision but does not by itself prove that the intervention caused it. Expand the improvement only when useful output, quality and sustainable capacity support that choice.
