10 proven productivity tips for customer support agents

A surprising fact is that lost productivity costs companies $1.8 trillion each year. Now, imagine your support teams lose many such productivity hours due to a lack of coordination, context, and appropriate tools. The problem is significant, yet business leaders continue to rely on outdated methods of support, incurring high operational costs. 

Plagued by random inefficiencies across every touchpoint of support operations, customer service teams face declining productivity issues. A 20% increase in support team productivity can significantly enhance CSAT while reducing high operational costs. But what should you do to boost the support team's productivity? 

In this article, we’ll discuss support team productivity, identify what holds you back from offering enhanced support, and explore ways to improve it, among other essential things.

Team productivity refers to the output and quality of tasks a team produces. With respect to support team productivity, it refers to the team’s contribution in resolving a fair number of customer tickets or calls in a specific time period. 

When you build a support team with outstanding productivity, the customer service gains huge benefits, such as,

• Efficiency: The team can reduce MTTR time to resolve issues faster 

• FCR speed: Support tickets easily achieve FCR with accurate and relevant answers 

• CSAT: The speed of meaningful support offers quick resolution and helps with retention 

• ESAT:  An increasing resolution rate keeps the team’s morale high and satisfied 

• Scalable support: Optimizing support helps scale support without increasing budget or headcount. 

It is essentially crucial to take steps that help boost the customer support team's productivity and cost-effectiveness.

Customer support management is always tricky. There are numerous things to navigate, which easily turn out to be overwhelming, and resource allocation can go awry. As a result, your support teams’ productivity declines, leaving you struggling with ticket management. Here’s how productivity takes a hit.

Poor resource allocation

Balancing workloads is a massive challenge. The key reason is the absence of visibility into workload distribution. Support team leaders often fail to adapt to shifting priorities, resulting in either underutilized or overutilized agents during peak and off-peak hours. 

Knowledge gap

Yes, this is so universal for any business. Knowledge bases often become outdated without ongoing revisions, and your support team juggles between various systems to find relevant data. 

Fragmented multi-channel support 

For customers, multi-channel support looks quite convenient. However, for support teams, connecting with all the tools at any time and from anywhere is not easy. They lie in silo— a valid blocker for productivity that encourages inconsistent customer experience. 

Lack of real-time insights 

Having no medium to track agent performance and support metrics, you don’t know who is doing what and how. Support leaders can struggle to make informed decisions about resource distribution and process improvements.  

These factors indicate how support teams are at the center of expenses due to inefficient resource allocation. Additionally, manual interventions in ticket handling and other operations add to high costs. 

If you want to improve customer support performance metrics that help boost cost savings, you're in the right place. Let’s get the best customer support productivity tips, 

The key to enhancing customer support teams’ performance is to utilize AI agents, which are increasingly prevalent these days, and many companies are leveraging them. Whether you need real-time performance metrics, the right tools, or ROI dashboards, modern AI agent platforms for customer support can cater to your diverse needs and optimize support with unprecedented productivity. Here are various productivity-boosting tips to elevate the customer support experience. 

Implement smart ticket routing and prioritization 

Do you prefer adding steps during the prioritization and routing of tickets? Definitely no. It is the most irking situation, where your team manually triages a ticket, which only increases MTTR. 

Automated routing or smart escalation is a powerful option for your support. Implement smart escalation to boost customer support team productivity and reduce the time to address a ticket. AI agents offer the best automated triage capabilities, which can easily identify agents suitable for specific ticket types. 

Let’s say your support team receives a ticket containing a message, ‘I am not able to use my laptop,’ or someone sends a message saying, ‘My transaction failed, but money got debited.’ When AI agents handle these types of queries, they can easily detect that the first one is meant for the IT support team, while the latter is suitable for the accounts team. AI agents can also handle ticket routing based on priority level if you set up automated workflows. 

pagergpt focuses on making triage a breeze. As a result, you can implement smart escalation and reduce manual triage to reduce the workloads and errors, while boosting productivity. The best part is that prioritizing automated triage helps reduce sorting time by 60%. Pay attention to it; this could be beneficial for improving your customer service performance.

Build and maintain a comprehensive knowledge base

Did you know that poor knowledge sharing costs Fortune 500 companies $31.5 billion per year? One of the biggest dangers of knowledge in silos is denying your customers unified experience. Your support teams would also not align with the customer expectations. 

Building a comprehensive knowledge base could be a breath of fresh air. Ensure you identify the knowledge gap and follow a standardized template to develop your knowledge base. After you build them, review them periodically and update your knowledge base.  

To avoid the manual stress of knowledge updating, which is often an outdated practice, we prefer to utilize AI agents to automatically update your knowledge base, providing continuous and real-time knowledge for problem resolution. 

pagergpt enables you to retrieve real-time knowledge from company-proprietary data, while also facilitating the automatic update of knowledge as your support team continues to build interaction history or unique interactions and actions. Your team can always stay up-to-date with the latest knowledge and guide customers effectively without incurring excessive effort and time. 

Adopt omnichannel support with unified dashboards

A ResearchGate study indicates that AI-powered omnichannel customer support increases CSAT by 31.5% and helps boost customer retention by 24.8%. 

Instead of having multiple tools fragmented, combining multichannels like websites, emails, chats, voice, social media, etc., onto one integrated platform, you can build a single source of truth for all customer interactions on a unified dashboard. It is an outstanding way to prioritize customer requests accordingly, escalate them to the right member, and personalize support for a consistent customer experience. 

pagergpt, an AI agent builder platform, helps customer support leaders improve customer support by allowing them to leverage an embedded unified dashboard via the Shared Live Inbox. It enhances team collaboration and knowledge sharing, which in turn improves agents’ productivity and accelerates the response rate.

Leverage autopilot for repetitive tasks

The power of agentic automation enables you to put your support on autopilot, allowing customers to easily manage their issues without needing agent assistance. By utilizing the autopilot, your customers can find answers to any routine questions. Whether it's password reset, account unlock, subscription upgrade, order cancellation, or purchase order status—anything can be easily achieved using autopilot, which is designed with LLM-powered knowledge built into the company's proprietary data to simplify knowledge search. 

With agentic AI capabilities built into your customer support tools, you can automate and resolve any repetitive tasks. AI agents, built with pagergpt, put your support on autopilot, which reduces workloads on your agents and increases their productivity, allowing them to focus on more strategic and challenging customer questions. This is a great way for you to implement 24/7 self-service and boost customer engagement.

Implement predictive and proactive support

When you experience a sudden service disruption, predictive and proactive support provides much-needed relief from the continuous influx of incoming tickets. By analyzing historical support tickets and customer sentiment, AI agents can determine the evolving nature of the current situation for a particular disruption and suggest proactive action.

Let’s assume a sudden bug attack creates a disruption at the checkout during BFCM, prompting customers to raise tickets to the desk. Predicting this as a pattern that will continue for several hours, AI agents can alert support teams to take proactive action. Instead of being bombarded by incoming tickets, the support team instantly issues a notice requesting them to try again later or offers an alternative medium to continue shopping. 

pagergpt utilizes advanced AI technologies to enhance proactive and predictive support. Built to work with any LLM models, you can derive essential data points and gain predictive analytics capabilities. 

Deploy AI copilots for your support agents 

To boost your customer support team’s productivity, deploy AI copilots to provide all-around support for quick ticket resolutions and prevent tickets from escalating to L2 and higher levels.  AI agents boost AI copilot’s abilities to offer end-to-end support for agents. Starting from the AI summary to the AI response and quick translation to quick references to articles, your support agents can quickly deliver help and reduce the volume of tickets at the tier-0 level. 

With pagergpt, your team members can easily leverage AI Copilot and boost their productivity. The advantage is that new agents can tackle situations without needing to seek assistance from support managers or leaders, freeing up their time to focus on high-value tasks. This way, your support can make decisions about how to utilize resources appropriately across various tiers and reduce unnecessary workloads. 

Empower agents with decision-making authority 

For every specific customer query, your support team must make decisions about the type of help that is most significant for quick mitigation and resolution. Connecting multiple data points to draw an appropriate conclusion and then provide a remedy is a time-consuming process. Manual interventions can also be a source of errors that delay resolution. 

Get AI agents for your support teams that provide them with quick decision-making abilities for any unique challenges. Let’s say your support handled a query where a customer was supplied with a troubleshooting guide for a washing machine that had faced a ‘dry malfunction’. 

Now, if other customers also have a similar query, a new support agent can quickly refer to the history, make decisions without having senior executive support, and provide a practical troubleshooting guide. 

With pagergpt, your customer support agents can increase productivity by accelerating decision-making abilities using advanced analytics. Hence, focus on empowering your agents and boosting efficiency. 

Use visual dashboards for real-time performance monitoring

How can you distribute the workload across your service team if you do not have performance metrics? Traditional support systems often lack advanced performance metrics, making it challenging to delve deeply and optimize resources. 

Advanced AI systems, such as AI agents for customer support, feature visual dashboards for real-time monitoring. With pagergpt, AI agent tools for your customer support, you can segregate various data points, such as agent participation, resolved tickets, and unresolved tickets, via a visual dashboard.

Based on these metrics on your visual dashboard, you can uncover agents’ workloads and their capacities in handling tickets. This granular-level visualization helps determine agents’ performance and their level of expertise, further assisting with resource optimization and reducing waste.  

Provide continuous training and upskilling opportunities 

Prioritize training programs to enhance the productivity of the support team. It has been proven that well-trained customer service agents can resolve tickets 35% faster and help drive CSAT scores 20% higher. 

What was once challenging is now easy to do. Creating training program modules for fundamental and advanced troubleshooting techniques is easy with an LLM-powered AI assistant. All you need to do is supply prompts and create various modules, including product knowledge guides, soft skill training modules, troubleshooting guides, and other relevant content. 

As your team learns and adapts, they can help improve their productivity in ticket handling and reduce ticket volumes. 

pagergpt-powered AI copilot creates comprehensive knowledge based on prompts and interaction history to train and upskill your team members.  

Establish clear performance standards and goals 

Your customer support team's productivity could greatly benefit from setting performance standards and goals. In this regard, a visual dashboard facilitates the creation of effortless goals. To determine performance improvements, set certain milestones. For example, you can put less than 2 hours for an average response time or a 70% success rate for FCR. 

As you customize your visual dashboards for performance tracking, you can review performance and identify areas for improvement. 

pagergpt’s visual dashboard is convenient for customizing actions and events, allowing you to understand the team’s performance, encourage productivity, and maintain SLAs.

Customer support agents’ productivity is essential to make or break your customer service. By now, you have learned about several important tips and also discovered how pagergpt provides crucial AI tools to optimize resources and maintain agents’ productivity. 

You might think, why should you prefer pagergpt as your go-to AI agent for enhancing customer support agent productivity? Here’s what you should know,

Intuitive visual dashboards

You could simply ask what extraordinary features pagergpt provides through its visual dashboard, while others offer this feature as well. 

pagergpt offers the most intuitive and easy-to-customize dashboard, which a non-technical person can easily use to create and manage custom datapoints and make improvements to various areas of customer interaction touchpoints. You can control graphs, bars, and other elements to achieve the desired results. 

Although others provide dashboards, they are complex and limited. In most cases, they do not align with your expectations. 

Cost-Effective AI solutions

Unlike any other AI agent platform builder, pagergpt offers the most affordable pricing options, which are cost-efficient, allowing you to enjoy unlimited messages for customer interactions. Within its free plan, you can get one chatbot and AI agent to create and manage a small volume of customer queries. You can utilize a significant number of AI-driven actions for repetitive and mundane customer operations, which are available as add-ons from most leading solution providers. With pagergpt, you can automate many customer support tasks without incurring significant expenses, which reduces operational costs and yields an excellent ROI.

AI agents for resource optimization 

pagergpt makes it easy to create AI agents and sub-agents to manage multi-turn interactions and boost self-service abilities through autopilot implementation. You can take advantage of autopilot capabilities to automate 80% of repetitive queries, which helps you optimize resources appropriately according to skills and query types. 

Scalable and flexible platform 

 When you have pagergpt to manage your customer support and increase agent productivity, you can be free of scalability concerns. As ticket volumes grow, pagergpt can also adapt to changing business needs and continue to provide tools and features to manage the growing volumes. Additionally, multilingual support, multi-modality, and model-agnostic features enable you to build custom AI agents tailored to your business needs and maintain cost efficiency. 

In the age of demanding customers, rising expectations can overwhelm support agents with a continuous influx of tickets, and their productivity can plummet due to overload and exhaustion. So, an AI agent builder platform like pagergpt can help to a greater length by providing a productivity boost for agents.  

As you aim to reduce operational costs and optimize resources, while boosting customer agent productivity, pagergpt is your go-to tool. Schedule a demo today.

How can I effectively improve my support team's productivity?

Unlike traditional support, AI agent-powered support provides you with an autopilot to boost self-service and reduce 80% of repetitive tasks without manual interventions. This reduces the number of tickets assigned to Tier 1 and provides productivity boosts to your agents, enabling them to focus on high-value tasks. 

What are the key metrics to measure support team productivity?

Agent performance metrics, such as CSAT, AHT, resolved tickets, and unresolved tickets, provide advanced insights to track performance and make improvements. AI agent-based support systems help boost customer support agent productivity by providing in-depth insights and analysis. 

How can automation improve support team productivity?

Customer support automation streamlines 80% of repetitive tasks, including order processing, password resets, account unlocks, and purchase updates. Traditional support cannot provide adequate assistance in automating repetitive tasks. However, AI agents can facilitate end-to-end automation. 

What tools can help increase support team productivity?

There are specific tools available to help increase support team productivity, including predictive analytics, ticketing software, email auto-schedulers, and agent inboxes. In most cases, these tools work in silo, disrupting team’s performance. An AI agent like pagergpt helps combine all tools onto the same platform and boost support team productivity.