7 Ways to Improve IT Call Center Productivity

The IT call center or service desk is no longer just a troubleshooting function. It has become a strategic lever of digital transformation, which directly impacts business continuity and employee experience.

However, IT leaders are facing growing challenges, such as:  

• Ticket volume surges from SaaS adoption, data security alerts, and hybrid work models.  
• Increased agent fatigue due to repetitive tasks like password reset resolutions.
• Siloed channels that frustrate end-users with inconsistent experiences.  
• Visibility gaps in performance metrics and CX KPIs.  

To resolve all these issues and optimize your IT call center productivity, you need more than quick fixes. You need a structured approach that combines automation, analytics, workforce management, and other aspects that align with enterprise goals.  

This blog outlines seven proven strategies that will help you transform your IT call center from a cost center to a high-performing support engine.

Proven Methods to Improve IT Call Center Efficiency  

The global tech support services market is projected to grow from USD 73.1 billion in 2025 to USD 122.5 billion by 2035, at a CAGR of 5.3%. To align with this growth, here are seven strategies to improve your IT call center’s productivity.  

1. Automate Ticket Triaging and Workflows

Manual ticket triaging is one of the biggest productivity drains in IT call centers. It increases the MTTR, due to which SLA compliance and average handle time suffer. But automation removes this bottleneck with its capabilities to categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets instantly to the right agent.  

In addition, automation ensures that high-priority incidents are escalated and routine issues are directed to self-service portals or chatbots. As a result, agents’ workload is reduced, leading to a prompt focus on sensitive issues.  

Moreover, Gartner has also analyzed that 80% of common service issues will be resolved by AI-powered systems by 2029. Here are some strategic implementations for IT leaders to improve contact center productivity:  

• Deploy ITSM platforms, offering AI-powered incident classification.  
• Introduce self-service portals with step-by-step guides, focused on high-volume issues such as password resets, VPN errors, and similar ones.  
• Configure auto-escalation rules for P1 and P2 incidents.  
• Use robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline routine customer requests, such as access provisioning.  

With these configurations, you will leverage automation across your IT call center workflow, increasing the overall productivity.

2. Leverage IT Performance Analytics

In IT call centers, what doesn’t get measured rarely improves. Yet numerous IT leaders still pull reports from multiple tools or use outdated spreadsheets to seek visibility into productivity metrics. As a result, they create blind spots in SLA adherence and incident backlogs.  

To eliminate such bottlenecks, you must use advanced IT performance analytics tools, such as Power BI, Tableau, or ServiceNow analytics. These tools will help you gain real-time insights into operational efficiency, remove bottlenecks, and predict future demand. Every next-gen IT call center services provider utilizes these tools to ensure the utmost level of service delivery.  

Additionally, below are the primary KPIs that every IT leader should track:  

• First Contact Resolution (FCR)  
• Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)  
• SLA Adherence Rate  
• Incident Backlog  
• Agent Utilization Rate  

Furthermore, here’s how each of the essential IT contact center KPI impacts business:

By tracking the call center KPIs, you will easily discover and resolve the friction points, while your workforce works at full capacity, driving ROI and measurable CX results.

3. Upskill IT Support Staff

Technology evolves faster than static IT training programs. That’s why IT call centers must enable their agents to upskill to improve productivity. Otherwise, the agents will face multi-layered issues, such as cloud infrastructure failure, security incidents, or integration breakdowns that cannot be solved with basic troubleshooting.  

In 2025, forward-thinking IT leaders and CX providers are conducting monthly and quarterly training drives, including certifications for IT support agents. In addition, they’re now treating agent training as a strategic investment, instead of a cost center.  

Here’s how upskilling IT call center agents drives ROI:  

• Skilled agents resolve more at Level 1, helping to lower the workload on agents working at L2 and L3.  
• Technical proficiency helps agents provide accurate resolution, directly improving the CSAT and NPS score.  
• Upskilling helps an agent to reach managerial positions, which boosts their career development and income and reduces attrition.  
• Cross-trained agents easily adapt to new technologies, helping IT call centers lock new deals, increase the range of services offered, and ensure client SLA adherence.  

Thus, when IT call center agents grow, so do resolution rates, client trust, and long-term profitability. 

4. Integrate Omnichannel Capabilities

End-users now expect the same seamless experience from IT support as they get from customer support agents. Yet, many IT call centers still operate using the traditional email and call channels, fragmenting the entire customer experience and increasing duplicate tickets.

With an omnichannel IT support model, you can unify voice and non-voice channels, including mail, call, chat, social media, in-app support, self-service portals, and AI-powered interfaces. All these channels will be combined into a single, consistent support experience.

Furthermore, you should ensure the availability of the following key elements in your omnichannel IT support infrastructure:  

• Unified ITSM Platform: You should integrate email, live chat, voice, and portal interactions using ITSM tools, such as ServiceNow or BMC Helix.  
• Channel Switching with Context: Ensure that an issue raised through chat can be escalated to voice without losing history. It’ll help you eliminate repeated explanations and improve customer satisfaction.  
• Proactive Notifications: You should always keep your customers/end-users updated about their ticket status. For this, you should use SMS, email, Slack, and other mechanisms.  
• AI-Enabled Routing: Use AI-powered IVR systems to direct tickets to the right team based on channel and complexity. It’ll help you reduce wait time and improve SLA adherence.  

When these elements click together, omnichannel IT support transforms from a patchwork of tools into a seamless support ecosystem.

5. Enhance Knowledge Management Systems

In high-volume IT call centers, repetitive inquiries, such as password resets, VPN issues, and software installations, consume significant agent bandwidth. Without a proper knowledge management system, such queries reduce productivity and frustrate end-users who could have solved issues themselves.  

By maintaining an effective and updated KMS, an IT call center can provide clear guidance to end-users, helping them resolve issues accurately without interacting with an agent.  

Here are some new-age aspects that make knowledge management essential:  

• It helps agents access runbooks, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides instantly and provides a resolution within a defined time constraint.  
• It helps end-users resolve simple issues via portals and chatbots, saving significant time.  
• The training load is also reduced, as new agents learn from knowledge-based articles.  

In addition, this table showcases knowledge management maturity levels to implement:

When you have a mature knowledge base framework, it not only speeds up resolution times but also empowers agents, reduces escalations, and enhances overall consistency.

6. Optimize Workforce Management

Even with AI and automation, IT call centers do need human agents, and to unleash their complete potential, you need a workforce management tool. It’ll help you solve two major problems, understaffing and overstaffing.  

By optimizing workforce management, you’ll ensure that the right number of agents, with the right skills, are available at the right time. As a result, you’ll maintain the service quality with cost efficiency.  

Additionally, it’s recommended to use an AI-powered WFM solution to align staffing with real-time ticket volume, prevent overspending, and reduce agent burnout from understaffing. Moreover, you should also focus on the following key strategies to improve IT call center productivity:  

• Automated shift planning based on forecasted demand to balance workload.  
• Leverage historical data, seasonality, and trend analysis using predictive analytics to ensure availability.  
• Implement skill-based routing to reduce escalation and improve the first call resolution rate.  

Therefore, when workforce management is optimized, IT call centers transform staffing from a cost driver into a value creator.

7. Drive Agent Engagement and Retention  

Even the most advanced tools cannot compensate for disengaged agents. In IT call centers, agent productivity is directly proportional to engagement and retention. If your call center has a high turnover rate, it not only increases hiring costs but also erodes institutional knowledge.  

You should invest in engagement strategies to improve productivity, which will directly result in optimized SLA compliance and stronger business continuity. Have a look at the table below, defining the engagement strategy to consider and the expected outcome.

Nowadays, employee experience is equally important as customer experience. As an IT call center leader, you should focus on both, as they’re directly proportional to each other.  

Transforming IT Call Centers into Strategic Enablers

Improving IT call center productivity is no longer about handling tickets faster. It’s about aligning IT support with your business strategy and driving significant ROI and ROX. By implementing the seven strategies as listed in this blog, you can:  

• Reduce incident resolution time  
• Increase SLA adherence and FCR rate  
• Optimize workforce efficiency while saving costs
• Build a resilient system for evolving technological needs  

This will improve IT call center productivity and transform it from a cost center to an ROI-driven business strategy. 

About the Author

Asad Mirza CEO of ContactPoint 360 at ContactPoint 360

Asad Mirza is the CEO of ContactPoint360, a globally recognized leader in customer experience innovation. With over two decades of expertise in digital transformation, AI integration, and global service delivery, Asad is regarded as a transformative voice in the CX industry. He has built and scaled high-performing teams across North America, LATAM, EMEA, APAC, and ANZ.

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