Speaker 1: Welcome to Managing Metrics, a series of videos highlighting contact center metrics that matter to managers. I'm Bruce Belfiore, CEO of Benchmark Portal, here to talk to you about agent satisfaction. In this video, we will define agent satisfaction, talk about why it's important, how it's determined, mention industry averages for the metric, and explain impacts that agent satisfaction rates can have on your operations. This video is brought to you by Benchmark Portal, the source for contact center training, certification, benchmarking, and consulting. If you like this video, please subscribe and hit the like button, which will allow us to continue providing you with valuable, free educational content just like this. Agent satisfaction is a key performance metric that has become a standard component of contact center benchmarking. Unlike some other metrics, it is much more than a number. It reveals a lot about the morale and loyalty of the individuals employed in your center and can have a close relationship to some other important metrics like agent turnover, adherence, and customer satisfaction, since happy agents make for happy customers. So how is agent satisfaction measured? Obviously, there's not just one methodology for measuring the satisfaction of agents. However, the industry has coalesced around the definition proposed by Purdue University researchers over two decades ago that is now widely used for benchmarking purposes. The question posed for agents to rank is this, overall, I'm satisfied with my job. This is scored by the agent on a scale of one to five, in which five is strongly agree, four is agree, three is neutral, two is disagree, and one is strongly disagree. Typically, this question is included in a longer survey that asks agents a broad range of questions about how they feel about their work relationships, leadership, work schedule and work environment, training and evaluation, recognition and appreciation, et cetera. However, overall satisfaction is the boiled down keystone question, where focus is put on the so-called top box agent satisfaction. The concept is that centers should be striving for a level of satisfaction, which reflects true loyalty to and engagement with the center, which is the strongly agree top box level. Now, of equal concern on the other side are those who strongly disagree and represent the bottom box for this metric. These very dissatisfied people can really undermine your operations, poison morale, increase turnover and cripple recruiting efforts. If we look at Benchmark Portal's agent voices report, which includes results from over 10,000 agent satisfaction surveys across all industries, the results are shown here. We can see from this that the majority of agents surveyed are satisfied with their jobs. However, keep in mind that these averages vary markedly from one industry to another. I note that many contact center managers have determined that generic feedback surveys aimed at all company employees do not give them the specific information they need to identify and remedy issues with their contact center employees. They prefer an agent satisfaction survey that is tailored for the contact center. As mentioned earlier, while the high level overall rating is the keystone query, drilling down through questions about teamwork, coaching, quality of service, resources and technology, corporate culture, career growth, et cetera, provide the information needed to improve, including some open-ended questions that solicit verbatim comments or provide you with greater insights and suggestions. Agent surveys must be anonymous to provide you with the level of honest input you need. Open questions, such as length of tenure in the center, allow for cross-analyses that will give you insights you can use in selecting improvement initiatives. Questions about professional growth can help you boost performance for the long haul. Many centers also have separate special purpose surveys, such as those for new agents focused on onboarding, initial training and nesting. Agents wanting to optimize agent SAT and minimize turnover will often ask us to conduct a feedback survey of their agents, which only takes about 15 minutes of each agent's time and can yield valuable, actionable information that can improve your agent's metrics as well as other key performance indicators. And now a couple of questions for you on agent satisfaction. When was the last time you conducted an agent satisfaction survey? How did you use the results? Please write your answer in any other comments below. We'd love for you to share your thoughts and ideas with the community of contact center experts who regularly visit us here. You can also find links to some of our other valuable resources in the description below. Also, please leverage our certificated training to achieve your agent SAT goals. Employees appreciate it when their employers provide them with quality training and certification. In addition to the agent course, which includes a module on at-home agents, the course is aimed at supervisors and coaches are designed to help these key staff improve agent satisfaction by giving them the tools and concepts needed to expertly lead their agent teams. Finally, don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel to get great content delivered to you. Good luck maximizing your agent satisfaction.