Maximizing the Productivity of Your Call Center Employees

Eileen Haggerty, the AVP of Product and Solutions Marketing at NETSCOUT, shares her thoughts on how companies can maximize the productivity of their call center employees. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

It is in every company’s best interest to keep contact centers operating smoothly. Contact center employees play a vital role in maintaining a positive customer experience, addressing new and demanding questions and requests from customers daily.

Yet challenges with commonly used UCaaS and UC&C contact center platforms have intensified in the wake of the pandemic. According to an annual survey conducted by NETSCOUT, UC&C platforms were responsible for the majority of IT help desk tickets for 29 percent of organizations in 2022 and UCaaS platforms for 27 percent in 2024.

The survey results also revealed that these issues often require several hours or even up to a day to resolve, showing little improvement from year to year. Meanwhile, commonly reported issues like dropped calls and delayed connection times impede call center employees’ overall productivity, making it difficult for them to address customer concerns as they are received.

Traditional call center performance metrics like “average speed to answer” and “handle time” do not really address issues like technical disruptions and communication delays, so to maximize the productivity of call center employees, enterprises would do well to consider additional means of evaluating agent performance. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of enterprises adopting new UCaaS platforms, emerging AI features offered within UCaaS platforms offer unique opportunities to enhance call center productivity.

Is it Time for Enterprises to Rethink Their Approach to Performance Observability? 

Many enterprises use packet monitoring and analysis to identify issues and evaluate the performance of UCaaS and UC&C platforms, utilizing tools from platform vendors, independent sources, or custom-built solutions. However, IT teams tend to rely more heavily on platforms’ self-reported performance data, which, while useful, their limited self-focus can fall short in explaining broader network and infrastructure problems. This limitation becomes particularly evident when IT teams troubleshoot complex issues, such as latency. Furthermore, while a platform view can help rule out their part in the communications path as the source of latency, the challenge of pinpointing the actual cause of the problem will persist until identified.

Additionally, NETSCOUT’s annual research has consistently shown that only about a quarter of enterprises can resolve UCaaS-related help desk issues within a few minutes on average. In fact, most problems take a few hours or more to fix. For more complex issues, which may impact hundreds or thousands of calls in a day, it may take days of disruption before IT can come to the rescue.

Thankfully, IT teams do not need to wait for a problem to surface to do something about it. By adopting more advanced observability methods that simultaneously look across all parts of the communications path, including service dependencies and UCaaS platforms, IT teams can identify potential problems in the network infrastructure or with platform providers. For example, proactive monitoring—using both synthetic and deep packet inspection—allows for a more detailed root-cause analysis of contributing factors that may be affecting the platforms’ performance and causing issues like dropped connections or service outages.

This type of proactive monitoring is akin to going to the doctor for an annual physical. It may uncover problems lurking just beneath the surface that may not be readily apparent but are contributing to other seemingly unrelated issues. And like going to the doctor, preventing problems early is often much cheaper—at least from a productivity or system outage perspective—than dealing with them when they’ve grown too big to ignore. Meanwhile, as companies invest in the latest crop of AI features, advanced monitoring becomes increasingly important to realize these features’ expected value.

How AI in UCaaS Platforms Can Enhance Employee Productivity 

64 percent of businesses believe that AI will boost their overall productivity, according to a recent Forbes report. Undoubtedly, many call center operators are similarly hoping AI will improve their call center employees’ productivity as well. In fact, over half of the organizations surveyed by NETSCOUT rated AI features as extremely important when selecting new UCaaS platforms.

Consider that AI can prioritize messages by urgency. As call center employees constantly handle customer requests, automated message sorting helps identify and prioritize urgent communications, ensuring they can promptly address high-priority issues. Similarly, new AI features offered by UCaaS platforms include text summaries of calls and messages, which allow employees to provide a concise synopsis of key points that can be quickly reviewed, reducing the time it takes for call center employees to listen to long voicemails or customer support requests.

Features like these will become increasingly valuable to call center employees. Depending on the platforms used, processing may take place locally or in the cloud. With that in mind, proactive observability helps ensure that these systems are working as intended. If not, it gives IT teams the information they need to troubleshoot the issues on their own or to loop in platform providers as needed.

Achieve Seamless Call Center Communication with AI-Enhanced UCaaS and Proactive Observability

Despite the improvements in workflow and communications that businesses are starting to see from AI-enabled platforms, technical issues like latency or misconfigurations can interrupt the communication and overall efficiency of call center employee productivity.

These employees play a critical role in assuring the customer experience, and enterprises must be careful to limit disruptions. Technology isn’t always perfect, but proactive monitoring leveraging both synthetic and deep packet inspection goes a long way to ensuring that the platforms employees use every day—especially UCaaS platforms—improve employee productivity and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.