improve agent efficiency Archives

Contact Center Management Strategies For Your Team

Posted on June 10, 2025June 10, 2025 Michael Hartsog

Effective contact center management is essential to running a contact center. It’s not as simple as setting up a few phones and handing your team a script (although we’re sure no one has thought that since 2005). But it’s equally likely that you’re so bogged down with managing the everyday realities that you can’t see the forest through the trees.

That is, you can’t see just how cluttered the contact center has become.

From staffing and training to managing operations and tracking KPIs, you spend too much time keeping a contact center running instead of doing what you do best: Connecting with customers.

That’s where Quiq comes in. Our Conversational AI Platform uses breakthrough technology to make it easier to engage customers, whether through live chat (also known as web chat), text messaging, or social media.

Let’s take a look at ways to improve your call center efficiency and how Quiq can help you reduce the clutter with 9 effective call center strategies in a handy infographic:

Download as a PDF instead

What is Contact Center Management?

Contact center management is the practice of overseeing all aspects of a contact center to ensure it consistently delivers exceptional customer service. This includes managing day-to-day operations, aligning teams, implementing strategies, and leveraging technology to create efficient and satisfying customer experiences.

At its core, contact center management involves responsibilities like workforce scheduling, performance tracking, and customer experience oversight. Managers must ensure the right number of agents are available at the right times, and that those agents are supported with the tools and coaching they need to succeed.

A critical part of effective management is maintaining consistency across all communication channels—whether customers are reaching out via phone, live chat, SMS, or social messaging. Customers expect seamless experiences, and it’s the job of contact center leadership to make that happen.

Contact center management also includes implementing smart strategies to drive better results. Techniques like skill-based routing ensure customers are connected with the most qualified agents, while self-service tools empower users to resolve issues quickly on their own. Together, these strategies enhance operational efficiency and improve customer satisfaction—two key outcomes of strong contact center management.

What Does a Successful Contact Center Manager Look Like?

Behind every high-performing contact center is a skilled manager who acts as the foundation of effective contact center management. This role requires balancing people, performance, and technology to keep operations running smoothly while driving customer satisfaction.

A successful contact center manager is a strategic thinker—someone who doesn’t just manage the present but plans for the future. They design and implement forward-thinking contact center strategies that improve operational efficiency and enhance the customer experience.

They are also data-driven decision-makers, skilled at interpreting performance metrics and turning insights into action. Strong contact center management means identifying trends, adjusting workflows, and setting measurable goals that lead to real results.

As an empowering leader, the manager coaches agents regularly, helping them adopt successful call center strategies that build confidence and improve every customer interaction.

Today’s managers must also be tech-savvy operators, leveraging tools like CRMs, AI agents, and workforce management systems to streamline workflows and scale customer support without sacrificing quality.

Lastly, a great manager is a customer advocate, aligning team performance with broader service goals—a defining trait of contact center management excellence.

The 9 effective call center strategies recap

Check out these call center strategies below:

Streamline your current system.
Boost agent productivity and efficiency.
Drive down costs.
Manage seasonal spikes and fluctuating demands.
Remove friction.
Improve the quality of your conversations with rich messaging.
Engage more qualified leads.
Increase conversions.
Increase customer satisfaction.

1. Streamline your current system.

How do you currently connect with your customers? Fielding phone calls, emails, and the occasional DMs can leave communications scattered and your systems fragmented.

Here’s what can happen if you don’t have a single, consolidated platform:

Customer conversations can slip through the cracks.
Your team wastes time switching between apps, programs, and windows.
Disparate technology becomes outdated and overpriced.
With no support for asynchronous communication, conversations can only happen one at a time.
Measuring performance requires pulling metrics from multiple sources, a time-consuming and arduous process.

Quiq lets your agents connect with customers across various channels in a single platform. You’ll improve your contact center operational efficiency with conversations, survey results, and performance data all in one easy-to-use interface.

2. Boost agent productivity and efficiency.

How do your customer service agents go about their day? Are they handling one call at a time? Reinventing the wheel with every new conversation? Switching between apps and email, and phone systems?

Outdated technology (or a complete lack of it) makes handling customer conversations inherently more difficult. Switching to a messaging-first strategy with Quiq increases the speed with which agents can tackle customer conversations.

Switching to asynchronous messaging (that is, messaging that doesn’t require both parties to be present at the same time) enables agents to handle 6–8 conversations at once. Beyond conversation management, Quiq helps optimize agent performance with AI-enhanced tools like bots, snippets, sentiment analysis, and more.

3. Drive down costs.

It’s time to stop looking at your contact center as a black hole for your profits. At the most basic level, your customer service team’s performance is measured by how many people they can serve in a period of time, which means time is money.

The longer it takes your agents to solve problems, whether they’re searching for the answer, escalating to a higher customer service level, or taking multiple conversations to find a solution, the more it impacts your bottom line.

Even simple questions, like “Where’s my order?” inquiries, needlessly slow down your contact center. Managing your contact center’s operations is overwhelming, to say the least.

Need a Quiq solution? We have many. Let’s start with conversation queuing. Figuring out a customer’s problem and getting to the right person or department eats away at time that could be spent finding a solution. Quiq routes conversations to the right person, significantly reducing resolution times. Agents can also seamlessly loop in other departments or a manager to solve a problem quickly.

Beyond improving your contact center strategies and operations, messaging is 3x less expensive than the phone.

4. Manage seasonal spikes and fluctuating demands.

All contact centers face the eternal hiring/firing merry-go-round struggle. You probably get busy around the holidays and slow down in January. Or maybe September is your most active season, and your team shrinks through the rest of the year. While you can’t control when you’re busy and when you’re slow, you can control how you respond to those fluctuations.

Manage seasonal spikes by creating your own AI agent using Quiq’s AI engine. Work with our team to design bot conversations that use Natural Language Processing (NPL) to assist customers with simple questions. AI agents can also improve agent resolution times by collecting customer information upfront to speed up conversations.

Daily Harvest’s AI agent, Sage, was able to contain 60% of conversations, which means their human agents saw a vast reduction in call volume. Perfect for managing the holiday rush.

5. Remove friction.

How hard is it for your customers to contact your help center? Do they have to fill out a web form, wait for an email, and set up a phone call? Is there a number in fine print in the depths of your FAQ page? Some companies make it difficult for customers to interact with their team, hoping that they’ll spend less money if there are fewer calls and emails. But engaging with customers can improve company perception, boost sales, and deepen customer loyalty.

That’s why Quiq makes it easy for your team and customers to connect. From live chat to SMS/text and Google Business Messaging to WhatsApp, customers can connect with your team on their preferred channel.

6. Improve the quality of your conversations with rich messaging.

Email and phone conversations are, in a word, boring. Whether you’re an e-commerce company selling products or a service provider helping customers troubleshoot problems with their latest device, words aren’t always enough. That’s why Quiq offers rich messaging.

What is rich messaging? It’s an advanced form of text messaging that includes multimedia, like GIFs, high-resolution photos, or video. It also includes interactive tools, like appointment scheduling, transaction processing, and more.

You can use rich messaging to give customers a better service experience. Whether sending them product recommendations or a video walkthrough, they’ll get a fully immersed experience.

7. Engage more qualified leads.

Do leads die in your contact center? Let’s face it: your contact center isn’t the place to handle high-value leads. Yet when warm leads find themselves there, you need a way to track, qualify, and engage them.

Here’s where AI agents can help with marketing. Quiq’s AI agents can help you identify qualified leads by engaging with your prospect and collecting information before it ever gets to your sales team.

A great example we’ve seen is from General Assembly. With the Quiq team by their side, they created an AI agent that helped administer a quiz and captured and nurtured leads interested in specific courses. This helped them strengthen the quality of their leads and achieve a 26% conversion rate, which leads us to our next factor for an effective call center strategy.

8. Increase conversions.

If you haven’t stopped viewing your call center as a cost center, this next topic should change your mind. While many contact center strategies focus on customer service, which can lean heavily toward complaints and post-purchase problems, there’s also tons of profit potential via effective contact call center strategies.

Adding messaging to your contact center opens up more opportunities to engage with your customers across the web. Live chat is a great way to talk to your customers at key points in the buyers’ journey. Using an AI agent to assist shoppers in navigating your website makes shoppers 3x more likely to convert to a sale than unassisted visitors.

Combining AI and human agents with Quiq’s conversational platform gives your customers the best experience possible without adding to your contact center’s workload—and it can lead to an 85% reduction in abandoned shopping carts. Plus, Quiq integrates with your ERP system so customer data is always at your team’s fingertips.

9. Increase customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction is likely your call center’s #1 goal. Outdated phone systems and substandard technology aren’t the best solution to improve call center agent performance.

Quiq empowers agents to be more efficient, which reduces your customers’ wait time and helps ensure customers get the best service possible. Quiq customers often increase their customer satisfaction ratings by about 15 points.

And the best way to increase your ratings? With regular, in-context surveys. Our agentic platform helps you and your agents get instant customer feedback. Customers can seamlessly respond to surveys right from within the channel they used to connect with your customer service.

Give contact center clutter a Quiq goodbye with effective call center strategies.

There’s no place in an efficient business for a cluttered contact center. Outdated systems, slow processes, and a lack of support can overwhelm your agents and keep them from performing their best for your customers.

Now that you’re equipped with ways to improve call center efficiency, it’s time to see it in action. Quiq’s Agentic AI Platform empowers your team to work more efficiently and create happier customers.

Contact Center Best Practices and Metrics to Track

Posted on May 21, 2025May 21, 2025 Michael Hartsog

No, the call center isn’t dead.

In the last few years, digital channels have seen tremendous growth. People can go online to find answers, send a text, chat with an AI agent, or even reach out on social media.

But while the industry’s focus has shifted to text-based communications, call centers aren’t going anywhere.

Since customers are still dialing, we’ve put together some best practices to help call center agents shine.

Show Customers You Care

Providing great customer service starts and ends with emotions. Answering customers’ questions is vital, but you’re really there to connect with them. And it starts with communicating effectively.

Listen

Listening is the first step. It needs to be said because it sometimes conflicts with other productivity goals. Take the time to listen to a customer’s complaints before diving into a script. Not only will you be better equipped to solve their problems (without a bunch of clarifying questions), but you also give the customer a chance to vent their frustrations and feel heard.

Demonstrate empathy

There’s a big gap between customer expectations and reality. Salesforce reports that 68% of customers expect brands to demonstrate empathy, only 37% of customers feel brands actually do.

Make sure to use phrases like “I understand” or try repeating back what your customer said to show you were listening. These types of responses are especially important over the phone when you can’t rely on visual cues like eye contact and head nodding.

Go off-script

Scripts are great tools to help call center agents solve customer problems, but they can sound stiff and stale. Customers can tell when you’re reading from a script, and it can immediately put a wall up between you.

While it’s helpful to follow the general outline to ensure you don’t miss any important information, inject some of your own personality and mannerisms into it.

Add humor when appropriate, double-back if a customer didn’t give a clear answer, or pull together language from a variety of scenarios.

Customers will appreciate it. (Just make sure it’s within company policy first.)

Avoid Transferring Calls

This one’s tough because it relies on so many other determining factors. But customers have come to expect quick resolutions to their problems, especially when choosing to call customer service over other channels.

In fact, Salesforce reports that 83% of consumers expect to solve their complex problems by speaking with one person.

The truth is, customers don’t want to speak with multiple people to solve their problems. It often means they have to repeat themselves (something customers don’t like), and it increases the time they spend on hold.

The best way to limit transfers?

It often comes down to infrastructure—something that is outside of call center agents’ control. This often includes bigger organizational initiatives like:

Setting up a knowledge base: Information should be easily accessible. That way, when you don’t know the answer, you can pull it up in the knowledge base instead of transferring the call to someone who does know.
Utilizing call center software: There are tons of call center software options that enhance agent and customer experience alike. Some offer options to notify a manager and have them listen to a call to help agents navigate more complex interactions.
Having a system to direct calls: If your company has multiple specialized departments, customer service centers should immediately direct calls to the right person. Call centers can accomplish this using an interactive voice response (IVR) system, web chat, or other self-service tools.
Training agents thoroughly: A knowledge base and customer service software are great tools, but they can’t replace thorough training. Agents should spend time learning the ins and outs of the business, in addition to customer service tactics.

Prepare to Tackle Complex Issues

Call centers aren’t the hub for information anymore. Online communications are growing in popularity.

Between easily accessible information and various other communication channels, making a phone call isn’t the go-to reflex for many customers.

According to Zendesk’s 2020 CX Trends report, 40% of customers choose a channel based on the complexity of their issue. That means when customers have a difficult problem, they’re reaching out to the call center.

Their problem is either too difficult to explain in an email, they’ve tried and failed to search for answers themselves, or they had a bad experience with online customer service in the past. Heck, some people just prefer to talk to someone over the phone. (Yes, they still exist!)

So what does that mean for call center agents? You need to be prepared for anything.

In addition to knowing your products and services inside out, consider conflict resolution training to help upset customers.

Keep these steps in mind when you have to deal with an angry customer:

Stay calm: Easier said than done (we know), but you’ll only escalate the problem if you respond aggressively or defensively. Take deep breaths, and try not to take any of it personally.
Validate your customers’ concerns: Tap into that empathy we talked about earlier. Show you’re listening and actually try to understand the core issue. Most of the time, customers just want to know that they’re talking to someone who can actually fix their problem.
Try not to argue: As much as you want to give the customer all the facts, now’s not the time to correct them. If they’re upset, they aren’t thinking rationally. So, trying to rationalize with them won’t make a difference.
Take responsibility: Check with your company policy on this one first, but it’s generally a good idea to accept responsibility. Apologize when necessary.
Find the solution: Once you’ve figured out the problem, try to find a solution that works within the bounds of your capabilities and satisfies the customer.

Sometimes it’s walking them through a difficult application setup. Other times, it’s offering a replacement product when there’s a failure. Ask call center supervisors for guidance on what’s acceptable to offer a customer to keep them coming back.

Contact Center Metrics to Track

Tracking the right contact center metrics is key to improving both agent performance and customer experience. Without clear benchmarks and data-driven insights, even the most talented teams can fall short of their goals. By focusing on a core set of metrics, you’ll be able to pinpoint areas for improvement, streamline operations, and deliver consistently excellent service.

While every organization has its unique needs, these five foundational contact center performance metrics offer a well-rounded view of how your team is doing and where to optimize. Mastering these metrics will help you drive measurable gains in efficiency, satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.

Average Handle Time (AHT)

Formula: AHT = (Talk Time + Hold Time + After-Call Work Time) / Total Number of Calls

Average Handle Time (AHT) is one of the most widely used contact center metrics. It reflects the total amount of time agents spend handling customer inquiries, from the initial greeting to the final documentation. While lower AHT often signals greater efficiency, it’s important to strike a balance. An AHT that’s too low may indicate rushed interactions that compromise quality.

To optimize AHT without sacrificing customer satisfaction:

Build out a robust internal knowledge base so agents can find answers quickly.
Equip your team with real-time guidance tools to reduce time spent searching for solutions.
Automate repetitive tasks such as call summaries or ticket categorization.

Improving AHT isn’t just about speed, it’s about empowering agents to resolve issues quickly and thoroughly.

First Call Resolution (FCR)

Formula: FCR = (Number of Issues Resolved on First Contact / Total Number of Issues) × 100

First Call Resolution (FCR) measures your team’s ability to resolve customer issues during the first interaction, no callbacks or follow-ups required. High FCR is often associated with increased customer satisfaction, reduced operating costs, and stronger brand loyalty.

Improving this critical contact center performance metric requires a combination of tools, training, and systemic insight:

Ensure agents have full access to customer history and context.
Train agents to handle complex issues confidently and independently.
Analyze repeat calls to uncover and fix recurring problems.

Ultimately, a higher FCR means fewer touchpoints for the customer and a more efficient operation for your team.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

Formula: CSAT = (Number of Satisfied Customers / Total Survey Responses) × 100

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a direct reflection of how your team is perceived. Typically gathered through post-interaction surveys, CSAT gives customers the opportunity to rate their experience, often with a simple question like, “How satisfied were you with your support today?”

To increase CSAT:

Send surveys immediately after the interaction while the experience is still fresh.
Follow up on negative responses to identify coaching opportunities and process improvements.
Focus on empathy and soft skills during training to build a stronger rapport with customers.

CSAT is a leading indicator of your team’s emotional impact on customers and a critical input into broader customer experience strategies.

Service Level

Formula: Service Level = (Calls Answered Within Threshold / Total Calls Answered) × 100

Service level tracks how quickly your team is answering incoming calls. Most contact centers set a goal like answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds. Meeting or exceeding your target helps reduce call abandonment and ensures customers feel heard.

To stay on top of this key contact center metric:

Improve forecasting accuracy to anticipate spikes in demand.
Adjust staffing in real-time to avoid undercoverage.
Use interactive voice response (IVR) systems to route calls more efficiently.

When service levels drop, customer frustration rises. That’s why maintaining high availability is so critical.

Abandonment Rate

Formula: Abandonment Rate = (Abandoned Calls / Total Incoming Calls) × 100

Abandonment rate tells you how many customers hang up before ever reaching a live agent. A high abandonment rate is often a red flag that wait times are too long, or that your system isn’t meeting customers where they are.

To reduce abandonment:

Offer virtual hold or scheduled callback options to eliminate long waits.
Display estimated wait times so customers know what to expect.
Implement better routing or self-service tools to resolve simple issues faster.

Monitoring abandonment closely is essential for understanding both your staffing efficiency and overall contact center performance.

Key Next Steps

Tracking the right contact center metrics lays the groundwork for stronger agent performance and happier customers. But metrics alone aren’t enough. The real impact comes from acting on those insights; adjusting workflows, coaching agents, and evolving your strategy over time.

Set a regular cadence for reviewing performance, and benchmark your results against industry standards and internal goals. Whether you’re focused on voice support or expanding into contact center chat metrics, aligning your KPIs with business outcomes will keep your operation running at peak efficiency.

Call Center Agents are the Frontline

Call centers are still the backbone of the customer service industry. And the most important thing to remember as a call center agent is this: You are your company’s representative.

Follow company policy, but don’t stop there. Put these best practices to use to deliver stellar customer service experiences.

Agent Efficiency: How to Collect Better Metrics

Posted on April 12, 2023November 15, 2024 Michael Hartsog

Your contact center experience has a direct impact on your bottom line. A positive customer experience can nudge them toward a purchase, encourage repeat business, or turn them into loyal brand advocates.

But a bad run-in with your contact center? That can turn them off of your business for life.

No matter your industry, customer service plays a vital role in financial success. While it’s easy to look at your contact center as an operational cost, it’s truly an investment in the future of your business.

To maximize your return on investment, your contact center must continually improve. That means tracking contact center effectiveness and agent efficiency is critical.

But before you make any changes, you need to understand how your customer service center currently operates. What’s working? What needs improvement? And what needs to be cut?

Let’s examine how contact centers can measure customer service performance and boost efficiency.

What metrics should you monitor?

The world of contact center metrics is overwhelming—to say the least. There are hundreds of data points to track to assess customer satisfaction, agent effectiveness, and call center success.

But to make meaningful improvements, you need to begin with a few basic metrics. Here are three to start with.

1. Response time.

Response time refers to how long, on average, it takes for a customer to reach an agent. Reducing the amount of time it takes to respond to customers can increase customer satisfaction and prevent customer abandonment.

Response time is a top factor for customer satisfaction, with 83% expecting to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company, according to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report.

When using response time to measure agent efficiency, have different target goals set for different channels. For example, a customer calling in or using web chat will expect an immediate response, while an email may have a slightly longer turnaround. Typically, messaging channels like SMS text fall somewhere in between.

If you want to measure how often your customer service team meets your target response times, you can also track your service level. This metric is the percentage of messages and calls answered by customer service agents within your target time frame.

2. Agent occupancy.

Agent occupancy is the amount of time an agent spends actively occupied on a customer interaction. It’s a great way to quickly measure how busy your customer service team is.

An excessively low occupancy suggests you’ve hired more agents than contact volume demands. At the same time, an excessively high occupancy may lead to agent burnout and turnover, which have their own negative effects on efficiency.

3. Customer satisfaction.

The most important contact center performance metric, customer satisfaction, should be your team’s main focus. Customer satisfaction, or CSAT, typically asks customers one question: How satisfied are you with your experience?

Customers respond using a numerical scale to rate their experience from very dissatisfied (0 or 1) to very satisfied (5). However, the range can vary based on your business’s preferences.

You can calculate CSAT scores using this formula:

Number of satisfied customers ÷ total number of respondents x 100 = CSAT

CSAT’s a great first metric to measure since it’s extremely important in measuring your agents’ effectiveness, and it’s easy for customers to complete.

There are lots of options for measuring different aspects of customer satisfaction, like customer effort score and Net Promoter Score®. Whichever you choose, ensure you use it consistently for continuous customer input.

Bonus tip: Capturing customer feedback and agent performance data is easier with contact center software. Not only can the software help with customer relationship management, but it can facilitate customer surveys, track agent data, and more.

How to assess contact center metrics.

Once you’ve measured your current customer center operations, you can start assessing and taking action to improve performance and boost customer satisfaction. But looking at the data isn’t as easy as it seems. Here are some things to keep in mind as you start to base decisions on your numbers.

Figure out your reporting methods.

How will you gather this information? What timeframes will you measure? Who’s included in your measurements? These are just a few questions you need to answer before you can start analyzing your data.

Contact center software, or even more advanced conversational AI platforms like Quiq, can help you track metrics and even put together reports that are ready for your management team to analyze and take action on.

Analyze data over time.

When you’re just starting out, it can be hard to contextualize your data. You need benchmarks to know whether your CSAT rating or occupancy rates are good or bad. While you can start with industry benchmarks, the most effective way to analyze data is to measure it against yourself over periods of time.

It takes months or even years for trends to reveal themselves. Start with comparative measurements and then work your way up. Month-over-month data or even quarter-over-quarter can give you small windows into what’s working and what’s not working. Just leave the big department-wide changes until you’ve collected enough data for it to be meaningful.

Don’t forget about context.

You can’t measure contact center metrics in a silo. Make sure you look at what’s going on throughout your organization and in the industry as a whole before making any changes. For example, a drop in customer response time might have to do with the influx of messages caused by a faulty product.

While collecting the data is easy, analyzing it and drawing conclusions is much more difficult. Keep the whole picture in mind when making any important decisions.
How to improve call center agent efficiency.
Now that you have the numbers, you can start making changes to improve your agent efficiency. Start with these tips.

Make incremental changes.

Don’t be tempted to make wide-reaching changes across your entire contact center team when you’re not happy with the data. Select specific metrics to target and make incremental changes that move the needle in the right direction.

For example, if your agent occupancy rates are high, don’t rush to add new members to your team. Instead, see what improvements you can make to agent efficiency. Maybe there’s some call center software you can invest in that’ll improve call turnover. Or perhaps all your team needs is some additional training on how to speed up their customer interactions. No matter what you do, track your changes.

Streamline backend processes.

Agents can’t perform if they’re constantly searching for answers on slow intranets or working with outdated information. Time spent fighting with old technology is time not spent serving your contact center customers.

Now’s the perfect time to consider a conversational platform that allows your customers to reach out using the preferred channel but still keeps the backend organized and efficient for your team.

Agents can bounce back and forth between messaging channels without losing track of conversations. Customers get to chat with your brand how they want, where they want, and your team gets to preserve the experience and deliver snag-free customer service.

Improve agent efficiency with Quiq’s Conversational AI Platform

If you want to improve your contact center’s efficiency and customer satisfaction ratings, Quiq’s conversational customer engagement software is your new best friend.

Quiq’s software enables agents to manage multiple conversations simultaneously and message customers across channels, including text and web chat. By giving customers more options for engaging with customer service, Quiq reduces call volume and allows contact center agents to focus on the conversations with the highest priority.

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