What is Agent Experience (AX)?
Agent experience (AX) refers to the overall experience of the contact center agent across their physical environment, mental well-being, morale, financial well-being, and their experience in doing their jobs. The current state of agent experience leaves much to be desired. Agent churn is anywhere between 30%-50%, depending on whom you ask, one of the highest across job types.
The state of agent experience
Psychology Today
Agents have an average of 10 hostile encounters with customers per day
RAND/Harvard/UCLA study
… verbal abuse was much more common in customer service jobs
Multiple sources
Agent churn of 30-50%, with next-gen agents likely to leave within a year
Reasons for poor agent experience: Ineffective productivity tools
According to Gartner,
- 84% of contact center agents do not think that their desktop tools help in resolving customer issues
- Agents navigate across 8.2 different applications on average to answer a customer question
In an exclusive agent-only survey conducted by BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center benchmarking organization,
- 63% of agents said customer queries are getting more complex but 64% of them do not have any tools to guide them through customer conversations
- In the same survey, 33% of them confessed they read through voluminous documents when the customer is on the line, not good for AX or CX for that matter
In a digital-first, and often digital-only world, agents are struggling with desktop tools designed for phone customer service in the 1990s.
Reasons for poor agent experience: Missing knowledge
We sponsored an online survey of contact center agents in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and the Asia Pacific region through SurveyMonkey®. Contact center customer service agents participating in the survey were asked to list their biggest pain points while delivering customer service.
26 percent | Finding the right answers to customer questions
25 percent | Different systems / information sources give different answers
20 percent | Hopping from one application / window to another
14 percent | Hard to keep up with all the new information/changes I need to know about
This trend was the same for agents across Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland, and Asia Pacific and points to a need for knowledge in the contact center.
Thought leadership from Forbes
The Looming Contact Center Agent Experience (AX) Crisis And What To Do About It
Benchmark Portal whitepaper
Agent Experience (AX): The Next Frontier for Elevating the Customer Experience (CX)
Why is agent experience important?
Agent experience impacts customer experience (CX)
Your braveheart agents are in the line of fire of your angriest customers. When customers reach them over chat or phone, they are out of both patience and time. They are already frustrated at their unsuccessful attempts at self-service.
Your job is to equip your agents with the technology and knowhow that will help them deliver the quality customer service they are expected to provide. When they can’t, you have dissatisfied and disloyal customers, harried agents, and an attrition rate of almost 50%.
Fact: Happy agents equal happy customers
What you can do: Upgrade agent experience from harried to happy in 2 steps
1. Try the Advisor Desktop in 30 Days service
The “Advisor Desktop in 30 Days” service makes it super-easy for contact centers and customer service organizations to implement a digital-first, omnichannel advisor desktop for quick business value.
2. Get eGain Advisor desktop
eGain Advisor is eGain’s digital-first, omnichannel desktop, guided by AI and knowledge. Once you’ve tried the 30-day agent desktop pilot, get it.
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Challenges faced by an omnichannel customer service agent today.
