How After-Call Work (ACW) Impacts Your Customer Service 

Customer service reps work hard to answer customer inquiries, manage calls, and find solutions to problems of all sizes. However, their work isn’t over once the customer interaction ends; they still have to complete wrap-up time after ending the call.

After-call work (ACW) is a critical part of a support agent’s job, and it plays a significant role in the overall customer service experience. This often-overlooked task ensures that customer records are accurate, follow-up actions are properly documented, and future interactions are more efficient.

What Is ACW?

After-call work (ACW) refers to the tasks that agents complete after a customer interaction is over. This often-overlooked task ensures that customer records are accurate, follow-up actions are properly documented, and future interactions are more efficient. ACW is a critical part of a support agent’s job and plays a significant role in the overall customer service experience.

TLDR: They’re working, but usually on less mission-critical activities.

Many customer service leaders may try to find ways to minimize ACW in an attempt to increase operational efficiency, agent productivity, and customer wait times.

While some strategies can help you accomplish this, ACW is similar to your average handle time — efforts to reduce these metrics should not compromise the quality of the work being done. We’ll discuss exactly how you can efficiently reduce wrap-up time without negatively impacting the customer experience in this post.

Common ACW Tasks

After-call work tasks may differ depending on the exact work your reps do and your own internal processes. That said, these are the most common ACW tasks:

• Logging interaction details and call notes in customer records in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
• Updating case statuses and customer information.
• Processing orders, refunds, or service requests.
• Scheduling follow-up tasks or escalations.
• Drafting summaries or detailed notes for team handoffs.
• Reviewing post-call knowledge base resources to resolve pending issues.

The Impact of Having a High ACW

Post-call work is an essential part of a customer service rep’s job. It ensures you have clear records of recent customer interactions, which can protect your organization and help you personalize solutions for individual customers.

It also makes sure that any next steps are taken to fully resolve an issue, whether that’s leaving a voicemail for a healthcare provider, ordering a replacement for a damaged e-commerce product, or escalating a problem to a manager.

While ACW is important, having unnecessarily high post-call work times can negatively impact your agents.

Agent productivity

One of the most significant ways that high after-call work times impact operational efficiency is how much it can drain agent productivity.

High ACW times reduce the number of calls that agents can handle in total, which decreases overall efficiency. You may need more agents on staff to handle the same volume of calls, or it may take longer for them to get to the next caller.

Customer wait times

Extended ACW contributes to longer queue times for incoming calls, which can be frustrating for customers. When it takes longer to complete after-call documentation, call center agents will likely have larger backlogs of increasingly frustrated and potentially agitated customers as a result.

No one wants to make a call to resolve an issue they have, and they really don’t want to listen to hold music for 15 minutes before speaking to an agent. Keep in mind that recent data shows customers expect an “immediate” response within 10 minutes or less from customer support teams; if they’re waiting longer, you can expect your CSAT score to drop.

Agent burnout

Excessive ACW times can increase agent workload stress, mainly when extensive documentation requirements cause extra time. More after-call tasks combined with larger backlogs of frustrated callers can significantly increase the risk of agent burnout.

This is the last thing any customer service leader wants. Burnout can decrease productivity even further, contributing to high turnover. And unfortunately, customer service agents are prone to both low job satisfaction and fatigue, with one study showing that 59% of agents were at risk of burnout.

As workload stress causes burnout, you can expect to see a high turnover rate. This can result in expensive hiring and training processes, which also cause reduced productivity as you get new team members up to speed.

Operational costs

Longer ACW times inflate labor costs, especially if agents are frequently overwhelmed by manual tasks. You may need to keep more agents on the schedule to handle the influx of calls and work.

Similarly, agent turnover can impact operational costs. You’ll need to hire and train new team members, and existing team member productivity may be reduced if agents are pulled away from work to help train coworkers.

How To Reduce ACW

Gather direct, qualitative feedback 

Carefully solicit and obtain feedback from frontline agents. You should listen when they discuss obstacles impacting productivity, increasing stress, or hurting the customer experience. In many cases, patterns emerge, and you can use this information to support your staff better and reduce stress without sacrificing productivity.

Standardize processes

Standardized processes become much easier and more efficient to complete. Agents become skilled at these processes, reducing their post-call processing times.

You can use templates and predefined workflows to simplify tasks so they save most of their time and energy for the actual call handling.

Provide training

Offer regular agent training on efficient processes, productivity-boosting technology, and time management. When agents know how to leverage call center tools and automation alongside streamlined processes, ACW times can decrease quickly.

Optimize systems

Ensure critical technology like your CRM, call center software, and automation tools are integrated to streamline post-call work. This will prevent data silos, which can cause confusion later on and also facilitates automatic data syncing while reducing task switching between platforms.

Monitor metrics

Regularly measure ACW times and identify trends or bottlenecks that need addressing with contact center reporting features.

Just as it’s important to identify ways to reduce your ACW times when possible, it’s also important to track customer feedback KPIs alongside agent performance. For example, customer service metrics may fall if follow-ups or escalations fail to happen properly. Track new initiatives to ensure that they’re benefiting operational efficiency and performance.

As a note: Industry standard benchmarks put after-call work time at around 45 seconds. This may vary from industry to industry; healthcare and insurance call centers, for example, typically handle complex customer needs and may have longer ACW times as a result.

How Contact Center Software Optimizes ACW

Contact center software like Nextiva can reduce your customer service team’s ACW times in multiple ways.

Automated summaries

Use AI tools to transcribe calls in real time and generate post-call summaries, reducing manual note-taking while still ensuring you have the detailed interaction records you need. 

CRM integration

Automatically log customer interaction details and update records in your CRM tool without agent intervention. This eliminates the most time-consuming task, which slows agents down and drastically cuts ACW times.

AI-powered suggestions

Leverage AI to analyze complex datasets and use machine learning to provide real-time recommendations for next steps during calls to minimize post-call actions.

Workflow automation

Automate repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails, scheduling callbacks, or assigning cases to appropriate teams. This reduces the time agents spend on simple but important tasks and can increase overall accuracy.

Sentiment analysis

Use advanced sentiment analysis to identify and flag critical calls for review, streamlining quality assurance and escalation processes. You can track trends in conversations, which can help you find ways to reduce ACW times without compromising on the quality of the customer experience.

Using Nextiva To Optimize Agent Productivity

Customer service contact center software can play a key role in reducing wrap-up times without sacrificing the customer experience. You can identify improvement opportunities while tracking optimization initiatives to ensure that they’re helping (and not hurting!) either agent productivity or the customer experience.

Nextiva’s call center solutions are designed to improve both the agent and customer experience. Here’s how we can help reduce ACW times:

• AI-driven summarization: Automatically generate detailed interaction summaries and log them in your CRM, cutting ACW time significantly.
• Automatic disposition timers: Enhance call center operations with auto disposition timers and boost productivity with individual agent reports.
• Omnichannel integration: Centralize customer interactions from all channels (including voice, chat, and email) into a single platform, reducing the need for manual data entry.
• Automated workflows: Handle repetitive tasks like case updates, follow-ups, and knowledge base lookups, freeing agents to focus on calls while increasing productivity.
• Real-time insights: Provide actionable data on ACW times, helping managers identify inefficiencies or training needs. This information can help them optimize processes to boost operational efficiency.
• Seamless CRM integration: Automatically sync call data with customer profiles, eliminating redundant tasks and improving record accuracy.
• Intuitive interface: Simplify navigation and task management, reducing the cognitive load on agents during ACW.
• 99.99% uptime and reliability: Ensure that agents have consistent access to the tools needed for efficient post-call work without interruptions.