How to Reduce Average Handle Time in Call Centers: The Vivo Case
Back in 2009, it was easier to shout a question to the coworker next door than to find an answer on Vivo's support portal. That organized chaos was hiding one of the company's biggest cash generators, and the answer to how to reduce average handle time in call centers didn't come from a new tool. It came from a consulting method that changed people, processes, and technology at the same time.
The call center wasn't just another cost center. It was one of the company's engines for generating cash, and every second of a call weighed directly on the business result.
The scenario before the transformation: a decentralized call center with no visibility
Before signing with Agence, Vivo was already one of Brazil's largest telecom carriers, but its call center operated like a set of disconnected islands. Each outsourced vendor kept its own way of working, with no shared standard for looking up or updating information. Agents ended up learning from each other by word of mouth, because the portal meant to support their work had become nearly useless in the daily routine.
Leadership felt this problem in a very specific way: they had no visibility. There was no precise way to know where the bottlenecks were choking the operation, or what the next steps should be to remove them. That operational blind spot was expensive, because the call center was one of the company's cash engines, driving upselling, customer retention, and new business. Reducing average handle time stopped being an isolated operational target and became a strategic business priority.
That was the scenario that led Vivo's Vice President of New Business to reach out to Agence, not looking for a technology vendor but for a partner capable of leading an end-to-end call center digital transformation case study. This piece walks step by step through how that partnership actually worked.
The main challenges holding back the operation and the business
- Poor quality customer service, sustained by informal, word-of-mouth communication between agents.
- Robust but slow technology infrastructure, with dated usability, including a lookup portal the team actively avoided.
- Outdated or incorrect information reaching the front line of support.
- Disorganized, non-standardized calls across the different outsourced vendors running the operation.
- Low collaboration between agents, business teams, and leadership.
- No visibility for leadership into operational bottlenecks or improvement opportunities.
- No structured process to prioritize and implement changes.
None of these points alone explained the whole problem. Together, they formed a cycle that was hard to break: the poor portal pushed agents toward word of mouth, word of mouth produced inconsistent information, and inconsistent information stretched out every single call. That cycle is common in large or outsourced call center operations, and it's exactly why fixing it takes more than swapping one tool for another. It was this diagnosis, not a list of technical requirements, that guided Agence's work inside Vivo.
Agence's methodology: diagnosis, ideation, prototyping, and implementation
Agence's response didn't start with a software proposal. It started with the consulting team stepping into the real routine of the call center, sitting next to agents, business staff, and leaders to understand where the operation was actually getting stuck. That kind of immersion is the foundation of the consulting and prototyping work Agence applies before any solution is designed, because a call center consulting project that ignores the daily routine of the people answering calls tends to solve the wrong problem. From that immersion, the project moved through four stages.
- 1DiagnosisAgence's team lived the day-to-day of the operation, mapping bottlenecks and listening to agents, business staff, and leadership before proposing any change.
- 2IdeationThe opportunities that surfaced involved people, process, and culture, not just tools. The goal became building a smarter, more collaborative call center, not just a faster one.
- 3PrototypingA mockup brought together the core features of the future support hub: a centralized call center digital transformation platform for every outsourced vendor, dynamic FAQs, and room for agents to contribute actively.
- 4Validation and implementationModular releases sped up the launch of the new portal, starting with centralization across the different outsourced vendors, followed by a permanent cycle of continuous improvement.
The solution delivered: a centralized call center portal, dynamic FAQs, and collective intelligence
The practical outcome was a digital, centralized, and tailored call center, built on the alignment between design, people, and technology. This centralized call center portal was born as a custom-built system, following the same approach Agence uses in web development projects made for mission-critical business operations. Three pillars supported this delivery.
A single portal
All Vivo call center content was centralized into a single platform used by every outsourced vendor. This cut the number of screens per call and simplified the operation end to end.
A dynamic FAQ knowledge base for support teams
Searches started updating automatically based on how agents actually used the tool. Reports gained richer data on usage and service quality, which gave leadership better information to decide on.
Collective intelligence in customer service
Agents themselves gained the ability to correct and improve the portal's content. This collective intelligence in customer service model drove engagement and an ongoing learning loop.
UX and usability as the pillar behind agent adoption
None of those three pillars would have survived daily use without a deliberate decision about usability. The new navigation was designed so agents and content writers could recognize the interactions they needed right away, with no paths to memorize inside the system. That cut the number of clicks per call and sped up the operation, a gain that shows up directly in the average handle time math. The contrast with the old portal makes this point sharper: that earlier tool also promised to centralize information, but fell out of use because it was hard to navigate. Technology without usability doesn't solve a business problem, it just hands the problem to another system that will eventually get abandoned too.
The results: AHT reduction, more upselling, and a better service level
30%
reduction in Average Handle Time
35%
increase in customer service level improvement
35%
increase in Customer Success Rate
40%
increase in upselling in call centers
These numbers came alongside a real-scale operation. The platform grew to serve 40,000 users, with 1,500 concurrent sessions and 12 million monthly accesses, reaching 2 million monthly visits. In a short time, 80% of Vivo's call center operation was running on the new portal, which shows adoption wasn't limited to an isolated pilot. The drop in average handle time and the rise in upselling didn't come from a single tweak, but from the combination of the three pillars of the solution with the usability work described in the previous section. One caveat matters here: these percentages reflect Vivo's specific context, scale, and starting point. They aren't an automatic guarantee for any other operation, but they do point to the real potential of a well-applied method, backed by a serious diagnosis and consistent execution.
Social proof: the same method replicated at Nextel
The strongest test of a consulting method isn't the result with a single client, it's the willingness to repeat it somewhere else. That's exactly what happened when the Vivo leaders who had lived through this transformation moved on to Nextel. Instead of looking for a different vendor, they called Agence back, to apply the same diagnosis, prototyping, and continuous improvement approach to the new company's outsourced call center operations.
That choice says more about the method than any single metric could: the value delivered at Vivo didn't depend on something unique to that company, it was replicable in a different business context. You can read this and other client stories on Agence's testimonials page.
That's the thread connecting both projects: the technology changed names and screens, but the method of diagnosis, ideation, prototyping, and continuous improvement stayed the same, and it worked again.
Frequently asked questions about reducing average handle time in call centers
Before wrapping up, it's worth answering a few questions that tend to come up when operations and technology teams discuss this case. If you want to go deeper into the typical stages of a custom software project, the guide on the software development life cycle covers phases and timelines that also apply to a project like Vivo's call center.
What is AHT and why does reducing it matter for the business?
AHT stands for Average Handle Time, the time an agent takes to resolve each call. Reducing it increases support capacity without hiring more people, and frees up time for upselling and retention efforts.
How does a centralized portal improve service across multiple outsourced vendors?
A single portal removes the need for each outsourced vendor to keep its own source of information. Every agent checks the same up-to-date base, which cuts down on conflicting answers and rework.
What is collective intelligence applied to customer service?
It means letting agents themselves correct and improve the content they use every day, instead of relying only on a central content team. That keeps the knowledge base closer to the reality of the support floor.
How long does it take to implement a transformation project like this one?
It depends on the size of the operation, but a modular delivery model lets you launch the first features in weeks, with the rest evolving through cycles of continuous improvement.
Does this only work for large operations, or also for smaller teams?
The method applies to any operation size. A smaller team won't be dealing with 40,000 users, but it faces the same symptoms: scattered information, an unused portal, no standardization.
Bring this transformation to your own support operation
What transformed Vivo's call center, and later Nextel's, wasn't a specific tool. It was a method that combines a diagnosis of people and process, fast prototyping, and continuous improvement, adaptable to the size and reality of each operation. If your own support team is struggling with scattered information, low tool adoption, or a high average handle time, this is the moment to diagnose the problem with a partner who has already solved cases like it.
