5 Tips to Increase Contact Centre Productivity
It's fair to describe the people on the front line of a contact centre as among the most measured workforce on earth. Time taken to answer. Time spent with the customer. Whether the issue was resolved. Whether it was the first time they'd called about it. All of it, all day.
And still, almost every contact centre leader is being asked to get more out of the same team. So here are five ways to actually do it — followed by the part most productivity articles leave out: what happens when you buy the technology and the productivity doesn't turn up.
People are the P&L
Labour is the single biggest line in a contact centre budget — which is why productivity is the first question asked and the last one answered.
21%
of Australian frontline agents are excited about AI. 55% are neutral to negative. The tools aren't the problem.
$10 trillion
Gallup's estimate of what low engagement costs the global economy each year. Engagement is a productivity lever.
ℹ️ About this article
The five tips below are a contributed article by David Stone, who has spent more than 25 years working alongside contact centre and CX technology vendors — so they're written through a technology lens, and we've said so rather than hidden it. The industry data, the 2026 reality check and the editorial commentary are ACXPA's, drawn from the 2026 Australian Contact Centre Best Practice Report.
Why Productivity Is Under the Microscope
The relentless focus on how to increase contact centre productivity isn't a fad, and it isn't (usually) cruelty. It's the collision of several pressures at once.
People are the biggest expense line
Labour dominates a contact centre budget, and labour costs keep rising. Any conversation about cost becomes a conversation about headcount within about ninety seconds.
Wait times suffer when you can't recruit
When you can't fill the seats, the queue takes the hit — and the customer experience with it.
Employee experience drives customer experience
The link is direct and well-evidenced. Disengaged, under-supported people do not produce great service, no matter what the script says.
Metrics make it look deceptively easy
Because everything is measured, cost-versus-outcome appears trivially calculable. It isn't — and that's where most productivity programs come unstuck.
Underneath all of it sits one idea: the promise of an efficiency dividend from digital self-service, combined with the need to help a churning workforce do more with less.
None of that is wrong. But productivity is not a switch you flip. What follows are five levers that work — and they work in the order they're listed, which is not the order most organisations pull them.
5 Ways to Increase Contact Centre Productivity
Make your people as happy as possible
Motivated, engaged and enabled people stay longer than the industry average — and in Australia that average is finally moving in the right direction, with frontline attrition down to 25% in the 2026 Best Practice Report, its strongest result in years.
Technology helps. It will never replace career development, education, recognition and a culture that visibly cares. Those are what retain and build top talent, and no platform has ever been bought that substitutes for them.
The economics are brutal and public. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace puts the cost of low engagement at roughly $10 trillion a year in lost productivity worldwide, with only about one in five employees engaged. Employee Engagement isn't the soft item on the agenda; it is the productivity agenda.
Read next: how to retain call centre employees, ideas to enhance engagement in a contact centre, and — because it's the cheapest lever available — how to enable psychological safety.
Get the right contact to the right agent
Use the platform you already own to identify what the customer needs and connect them to the person best able to resolve it. Skills Based Routing and predictive routing are available on most modern platforms: they gather data on the customer and their intent, and match them to an agent with the right skill or characteristic.
Get this right and First Call Resolution goes up, Average Handling Time comes down, and the customer doesn't have to explain themselves twice. Get it wrong and you have a well-staffed queue full of people who can't help.
One caution: routing rules quietly rot. Skills get added, campaigns end, people move teams, and nobody goes back to the routing table. If you haven't audited yours in the last twelve months, that's a free productivity gain sitting in a config screen.
Take Workforce Management seriously
Build a genuine workforce management strategy so you have the right blend of skills deployed at the right time. Done properly it flattens the peaks, keeps the queue honest, and stops expensive specialists sitting idle while a generalist queue overflows.
It also prevents the opposite failure — overstaffing — which is invisible on a service level report and extremely visible on a budget.
And it's an employee experience lever too. Letting people pick, choose and swap shifts cuts rostering overhead and buys you goodwill you didn't have to pay for. Occupancy and shrinkage are where the honest conversation happens: if occupancy is running hot, your people are not underperforming, they're under-resourced.
Read next: how workforce planning drives a better customer experience, where Erlang C stops being enough, and how to handle overflow calls.
Support your people with knowledge
Agents are asked to navigate multiple applications, complete complex processes, and hold multiple products and policies in their heads. That drives longer calls, longer after-call work, worse service — and, eventually, churn.
Contextual knowledge management fixes a surprising amount of this. Good systems don't just answer the agent's question; they tell them the next step in real time, what to say, and which screen to go to. That's compliance, yes — but mostly it's a faster, cleaner outcome for the customer and a far less stressful day for the agent. Training costs fall too, because contextual help acts as an always-on coach.
The Australian data now backs this hard: 95% of senior leaders in the 2026 Best Practice Report rate knowledge management as important or very important. It has gone from a nice-to-have to a core operating capability in about three years.
Automate and augment
Automation is accelerating, and conversational AI can now handle increasingly complex tasks across every channel, voice included. The point of most automation is not to remove people — it's to free them for the work that genuinely needs a human, particularly anything requiring empathy.
Customers are perfectly happy with self-service, on three conditions: no waiting, their channel of choice, and it actually resolves the thing. Fail any one of those and you haven't deflected the contact, you've delayed it — and it will come back angrier and longer.
Augmentation is the underrated half. Using biometrics to authenticate can save meaningful time on every single call, and identifying a caller before the call reaches an agent — with their details already on screen — compounds across every interaction in the centre.
Read next: tips for enhancing CX using generative AI and how to save time and money by rethinking automation.
The 2026 Reality Check
This article was first published in 2022, when the industry was awash with confident forecasts about what AI would do to contact centre productivity. Those forecasts now have a due date that has passed, so it seems only fair to check them.
Customer service organisations using AI-enabled knowledge automation would hit 90% first-call resolution by 2025, up from 50%.
Knowledge management is now rated important by 95% of senior leaders — but nobody in Australia is reporting anything close to 90% FCR. The capability arrived. The outcome didn't follow automatically.
Conversational AI deployments in contact centres would deliver tens of billions in agent labour savings by 2026.
AI is now used in some form by the majority of Australian contact centres — and 2026 is the first year a clear majority of leaders expect human contact volume to fall. The direction was right. The timeline was optimistic, and the savings landed unevenly.
The gap isn't capability. It's adoption.
The most uncomfortable number in the 2026 Best Practice Report has nothing to do with technology performance: only 21% of frontline agents are excited about AI, and 55% are neutral to negative.
And here's the thing — the report also finds the technology is largely making their jobs easier. The tools work. What isn't keeping up is the communication and change management around them.
You cannot buy your way out of that. A knowledge base nobody trusts, a routing change nobody explained, or an AI assistant that arrived with no conversation about what it means for someone's job, will all underperform their business case — not because the software is bad, but because the people it was bought for weren't brought along.
Which brings us back to tip one, and why it's tip one. Every productivity lever in this article is delivered through a human being who has to actually use it. Engagement isn't a nice complement to the technology strategy. It is the delivery mechanism for it.
Worth reading alongside: using gamification to maximise employee engagement and the habits of successful team leaders — because your team leaders are the change management, whether you've resourced them for it or not.
Measure It Before You Try to Fix It
The fastest way to waste money on productivity is to buy something before you know where the time is actually going. A short diagnostic first will tell you which of the five tips above is your constraint — and it's rarely the one that's currently in the budget.
Whatever you use, measure first. Productivity programs that start with a purchase order tend to end with a lessons-learned document. If you want to know where you genuinely sit against the rest of the industry rather than against your own history, that's what independent benchmarking is for — and the metrics that matter are a good place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is contact centre productivity?
In its simplest form, it's how much useful work your contact centre delivers for the resources it consumes — usually expressed as contacts resolved per paid hour. The trap is that it's easy to improve on paper by squeezing the same people harder, which shows up as a productivity win in one quarter and an attrition bill in the next. A genuine productivity gain means the same team resolves more, or resolves it better, without paying for it in burnout or rework.
How do you increase contact centre productivity without burning people out?
Attack the friction, not the person. In practice that means: remove the time agents lose hunting for information (knowledge management), stop misrouting contacts to people who can't resolve them (routing), stop building rosters that leave the queue exposed at 10am and idle at 3pm (workforce management), and automate the contacts that never needed a human. Every one of those returns time to the agent. Pushing occupancy up, by contrast, borrows time from them — and it always gets repaid, usually through absenteeism and resignations.
Which contact centre metrics actually measure productivity?
No single one, which is why it's so often measured badly. Occupancy tells you how hard your available people are working, but a high number is a warning, not a trophy. Utilisation tells you how much of a paid hour reached the queue at all. Average handling time is only meaningful next to first call resolution — cutting one while damaging the other is a net loss. And shrinkage explains most of the gap between the headcount you're paying for and the headcount answering calls. Look at them together or you'll optimise one and break another.
Will AI increase contact centre productivity?
It already is, but not on the timeline the 2022 forecasts promised, and not evenly. The majority of Australian contact centres now use AI in some form, and the 2026 Best Practice Report finds the technology is largely making agents' jobs easier. The constraint has shifted from capability to adoption: only 21% of frontline agents say they're excited about it and 55% are neutral to negative — which is a communication and change management problem, not a software one. AI deployed onto an unprepared workforce reliably underdelivers its business case.
What's the fastest productivity win in a contact centre?
Usually the least glamorous one: an audit of your routing rules and your knowledge base. Routing tables silently rot as skills, campaigns and teams change, and misrouted contacts are pure waste — they consume an agent's time and then still have to be handled by someone else. A knowledge base that agents don't trust does the same thing more quietly. Neither requires a purchase order, and both typically return time within weeks.
Does more automation mean fewer agents?
It means different agents. Automation removes the simple, repetitive, high-volume contacts first — which is exactly the work that used to give new starters an easy on-ramp and give experienced agents a breather between hard calls. What's left is denser, more complex and more emotionally demanding. So headcount may fall, but handle time, required skill level and the case for proper coaching all go up. Plan for that, or you'll automate your way into a harder job that you're still paying entry-level rates for.
Where to Next
Related Articles
Summary
Five levers: look after your people, route the contact to someone who can actually resolve it, plan the workforce properly, put the knowledge where the agent needs it, and automate what never needed a human in the first place.
Technology genuinely helps across every stage of the interaction lifecycle, and it will lift both productivity and the experience — for the customer and the employee. But it only pays out when it sits inside a wider framework of sound policy, sound process and, above all, culture.
The 2022 forecasts got the direction right and the timeline wrong. Four years on, the capability is here and the productivity is still stuck behind the same door it always was: whether the people expected to use it were brought along, or simply had it installed around them.
- About the Author
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David brings over 25 years of experience within the Contact Centre, Customer Experience and AI industry. His strategic knowledge of emerging trends and innovation is sought out by CX leaders across the industry sectors.
With a focus on delivering exceptional customer and employee experience, David ensures the careful consideration of technology, process and culture to deliver successful and sustainable outcomes.
David’s career has been as a strategic sales leader working alongside every major contact and customer experience vendor to deliver innovation to Government, Enterprise and Medium-sized businesses.
When not involved in CX David is a life member at Bronte Surf Lifesaving Club, a sometimes marathon runner and a supporter of start-ups.
Great list David, providing employees with opportunities to upskill and become role ready is another effective way, too often we are reactive to situations. I’ve often heard employees tell me they’ve been asking for training for ages and now people have left or demand has increased they’re expected to learn almost overnight. Be proactive, provide pathways and encourage self development and learning options.