Overall Satisfaction

Our Agent Voices blog posts are drawn from the results of research on over 5,000 agent surveys conducted in North America. 

 This category focuses on the crucial “inner work life” and psychic satisfaction that agents receive from working in their current jobs.

The first question ("I am proud to say I work for this organization") will tend to skew toward the high side for companies that are well and favorably known to the public, at least locally. An employer name that evokes a positive reaction from friends and acquaintances will be favored in this question.

The next two questions are more focused on the inner work life of the agent, and the intent to remain with the company.

The fourth question is a “net promoter” question, seen by some as the ultimate indication of how you feel about an issue.

The above items give the agent some framework and context for responding to the last question, which is the “overall” question that is generally used for high-level benchmarking purposes (shown on its own in the bar graph below).

Interpretation

This category provides strikingly positive indications overall. It appears that most employers of the surveyed agents are doing a good job of hiring the right people and doing things that will cause them to want to stay on. We can infer that the employers are reasonably diligent in screening candidates, providing them with a realistic job preview (essential to avoid hiring people who quit because they did not know what they were getting into), and follow other best practices that agents appreciate.

The net promoter score result (“I would recommend my employer to friends”) is remarkable and encouraging. We have seen from experience that, in fact, many centers rely on current employees to help recommend and recruit people they know and feel will fit in well. In some centers, managers stimulate this by offering incentives to employees who introduce people who are accepted for hire and then remain with the center for a certain period of time. Some centers have seen that this approach can create a virtuous cycle: happy agents recommend people they think will make competent and happy colleagues, which makes them both happy to be working for this employer long term, and also makes them enjoy coming to work more.

The insight into inner work life provided by this category is encouraging. We note as a caveat that not all centers survey their agents, and that centers that do so tend to be more advanced in their HR thinking. This may produce more satisfied agents overall, compared with the average center. If these considerations are valid, then the results of this study may skew toward the positive, and show a more satisfied workforce than is actually present, on average, across all contact centers in North America.

However, for managers who are looking to compare their operations with the results obtained by responsibly-managed centers that are striving for best practices, this statistically-robust study provides valuable, usable information.

Managers who face less positive situations in their centers can perform drill-down analyses on the individual categories to identify where they might intervene to make things better.