New Best Practices For Productivity Management In The Contact Center

Managing productivity in contact centers is such a fundamental, well-understood practice that it receives almost no process analysis and therefore seldom changes. Even after a quarter-century of operations and industry evolution, Productivity Management is performed largely the same way now as then. Supervisors and team leaders get data from operations reports and have to spend time analyzing them to get actionable information. The analysis process is manual, time-consuming and a poor use of front line management.

And it's getting worse! The sources of productivity data have multiplied. Skill routing and multi-skilled agents complicate the formerly simple task of rank-ordering agents for efficiency. Often, in a multi-skill environment, it is nearly impossible to know what agents are doing and how well they do it. Increasing complexity has rendered traditional Productivity Management ineffective and misleading.

Productivity Management is too important to be neglected when center management considers investment in new technologies and practices.