SEPTEMBER 2023 RELEASES
September 2023 Releases
How to Improve Agent Productivity with AI | Regal
What is agent productivity in contact centers?
Agent productivity measures how efficiently contact center agents handle customer interactions—calls per hour, average handle time (AHT), and first-call resolution (FCR). AI agent platforms improve productivity by automating repetitive routing, providing real-time coaching, and handling simple calls autonomously, freeing human agents for complex cases that require judgment.
Intro
In a high-volume outbound contact center – for sales, enrollment, winback, appointment setting or collections use cases – efficiency is the name of the game. The goal is to maximize outreach, customer conversations, and ultimately conversions with a lean team. Each agent hour has a cost, so wasted time equates to wasted money—fewer conversations mean fewer conversions. Success is about moving as many customers as possible through the funnel.
In this blog, we share tips to improve agent productivity for those handling high-volumes, many of which can benefit other teams as well. The guiding strategy to optimizing efficiency is simple — focus agents' time on the part of their job that requires their attention and expertise, and automate everything else.
#1 Connect Agents to High-Intent Prospects Faster
Use High-Efficiency Outbound Dialers
For high-volume outbound campaigns that don’t require agent prep, like lead qualification or re-engagement efforts, consider using a Powerdial, Progressive Dialer, or Predictive Dialer to maximize agent talk time. Unlike Click-to-Dial or a Preview Dialer, where agents have to manually review customer information before dialing, Powerdial automatically runs through a list of calls and starts dialing as soon as an agent is finished with their previous call. For ultra-high-volume, low-answer-rate campaigns, Progressive and Predictive Dialers improve agent productivity even more by dialing multiple contacts at once, skipping the ringing, and ensuring agents are connected only when a contact answers. This feature multiplies the reach and throughput of each agent on your team.
Auto-Accept Incoming Calls
In any high-volume outbound contact center, inbound callbacks are ~10-20% of the volume of calls handled. As these often represent the most high-intent contacts, it’s important to balance the efficiency of your outbound efforts, with having enough agent availability to answer 80% of inbound calls in under 30 seconds. Typically teams will staff dedicated inbound agents to handle these calls. However, within Regal, you can also prioritize calls based on urgency and customer status. You can set a higher priority for inbound calls, ensuring that agents focus on those first, and further reduce inbound abandon rates by using Task Auto-Accept to automatically connect agents to incoming calls without requiring them to manually review or accept the call in advance. When an agent wraps up their current call, they’ll immediately be connected to the next highest priority call in the queue, minimizing customer wait times and boosting efficiency.
Leverage AI Agents to Handle Simple Interactions
For tasks like qualifying leads, you can expand your human agents’ reach with AI Phone Agents. By equipping your AI agent with campaign-specific context and goals, it can start placing multiple calls simultaneously, qualifying the lead, then booking meetings with human reps or even transferring calls to human reps live. This allows your human agents to focus on conversations with leads that have already been qualified by the AI, reducing time spent on unqualified leads and repetitive interactions that follow a standard script.
#2 Make Relevant Customer Context Quickly Accessible
To keep conversations as productive as possible and maximize your ability to improve agent productivity, it's essential to make the relevant customer context readily accessible so agents can either optimize their prep time or quickly gain the necessary information as soon as they’re on a call. Too much information can also slow down conversations, so it’s important to get the right information in front of your agents for each type of conversation. You can achieve this in several ways:
Highlight Customer Context with Custom Events
Customize the contact history your agents rely on by promoting custom events capturing key information like purchases, funnel stage, and risk level. Use color-coding to indicate the sentiment of each event— for example, marking subscription cancellations in red and payment receipts in green. You can customize which event properties are visible to agents, allowing them to focus on the most relevant details and reduce unnecessary noise.
Link Contacts to Salesforce Opportunities
If you’re using Salesforce as your CRM, Regal’s native Salesforce integration gives your agents direct access to opportunity details, helping to improve agent productivity and allowing them to close deals faster. Updates to Salesforce Opportunities in Regal automatically sync back to Salesforce (and vice versa) so data your agents are seeing is always live and relevant.
Auto-pop a Script or Custom Link
With the Task Auto-Open URL setting, you can specify a link that automatically opens in a new tab when agents accept a task, ensuring they have immediate access to critical resources. For example, for a first call to a new lead, auto-pop a script with relevant questions that agents can start asking right away. Or auto-pop a view in your custom app or CRM of the contact’s patient history, document history, or whatever is most relevant to your team.
#3 Create Personalized Plug-and-Play Response Templates
Leave Pre-recorded Voicemails
Even with the most advanced outbound sales dialers, some percentage of calls handed to agents will still be voicemails. Rather than wasting 15-30 seconds leaving a manual message each time, agents can use pre-recorded voicemail drop, which leverages pre-recorded voicemail recordings that can be configured by campaign or agent so that voicemails are still tailored to the funnel stage of the contact. This achieves the right balance between efficiency and personalization.
Start with SMS and Email Templates
You can save agents time by composing templates they can use for common responses over SMS and email, tailored to their team – for example, when responding to objections or questions. Use variables to personalize the message with the contact’s name, timelines, and other project or purchase details to increase engagement and make the message feel specially composed for them.
#4 Cut Down on Post-Call Work
Spending time summarizing calls takes away time from hopping on the next call. Agents who summarize tasks efficiently can handle more conversations overall.
Set the Pace of Post-Call Work with Auto-Complete
If you notice the team’s wrap-up time is longer than what you expect, first clarify what’s essential post-call work, then consider using Task Auto-Complete to show a countdown timer and cap the wrap-up time to help them move on. Task Auto-Complete enables you to set a maximum time for agents to summarize a task before the system automatically wraps it. You can customize the max wrap-up time by team and task type to accommodate your team's needs. For instance, high-volume SDR agents may require less than a minute to wrap up short qualification calls, while licensed sales reps may need more time after longer sales calls.
Automate Call Summaries with AI
You can eliminate the time agents spend manually summarizing calls by using AI-generated call summaries. After Regal finishes transcribing your call, Regal’s AI Conversation Intelligence automatically captures key points of the conversation and actionable topics (e.g., “Competitor Mentioned”) via manager-defined trackers, all without agent intervention. These insights are then posted directly to the activity feed for easy reference in future interactions. Sentiment analysis also provides agents with a quick snapshot of the contact's mood, helping them gauge if more delicate handling may be needed in upcoming conversations.
#5 Automate Follow up with Journeys
For more generic messages that are used to engage or nurture leads, but don’t require agent involvement—such as promotional deals for old leads, appointment reminders, or no-show follow-ups prompting rescheduling—Journeys can automate the process. This approach allows you to target and engage specific segments at scale with personalized, dynamic messages using contact attributes and even images without wasting agents’ time. Every automated SMS saves an agent ~30-60 seconds – time they would have spent looking up the contact, composing the message, proof-reading the message, and wrapping the task.
Every Second Counts
Regal provides the tools to improve agent productivity and efficiency alongside detailed reporting on key performance metrics like tasks completed, conversations handled, hours available, and time spent on each step—prep, talktime, and task summarization. These insights allow you to highlight top performers, identify where agents may need additional support, and implement solutions—whether it’s auto-completing tasks, using journeys for automated SMS, or providing agents with more comprehensive context during call prep—to better support your team and improve overall performance.
Ready to pick up the pace? Request a demo today.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average agent productivity benchmark for contact centers?
Most contact centers target 75–85% agent occupancy and 6–8 minutes average handle time. Teams using AI automation typically see 20–40% AHT reductions by eliminating manual tasks like after-call work and data entry.
How does AI improve contact center agent productivity?
AI improves productivity three ways: automated routing sends each call to the right agent instantly; real-time coaching surfaces customer data during calls; and AI agents handle high-volume repetitive calls entirely so humans focus on complex interactions.
What metrics should I track to measure agent productivity?
Track: Average Handle Time (AHT), First Call Resolution (FCR), calls per agent per hour, after-call work time, agent occupancy rate, and CSAT. Modern AI platforms like Regal surface all of these in a unified analytics dashboard.
Can AI agents replace human contact center agents entirely?
Not for complex cases. AI agents excel at scheduling, qualification, order status, and FAQs—but human agents remain essential for empathy-heavy scenarios and complaints. Top contact centers use AI to handle 40–60% of volume automatically.
How long does it take to see productivity gains after deploying AI agents?
Most enterprises see measurable improvements within 30–60 days. Initial quick wins like reducing AHT on inbound routing can appear in the first week. Full automation of specific call types typically takes 4–8 weeks.
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Founded in 2020, Regal is an enterprise voice AI agent platform for contact centers. Regal helps businesses build, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents across sales, support, and operations teams.
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