‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ research shows agents are keen to improve customer service, but not always given the right tools to do the job

• Agent feedback highlights the ‘green’ challenge facing today’s out-of-town contact centres

• Serious lack of agent coaching revealed, and significant discrepancies between how agent performance is measured and how they are paid

• Significant technology frustrations centre around difficulties in hearing calls, and poorly-performing agent desktop systems

LONDON – 12 June 2008 – Sabio, the contact centre consultancy services company, has announced the initial findings from its new ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ research project conducted by YouGov to gain a better understanding of the needs, challenges and desires of today’s contact centre agents. According to the new research, UK agents are much more loyal than they are generally given credit for – over a third surveyed had been in the industry for five years or more, Agents also are frustrated when they can’t help the customers they deal with, and feel that they are not always given the right tools and information to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

Initial findings include:

• Serious transport concerns for agents and a significant Green issue for contact centre operators – nearly two thirds of agents drive to work or share a lift with a friend – and when they get to work it’s always difficult to find parking. Only 23 per cent travel by bus, 15 per cent walk and just two per cent cycle. Contact centres need to do much more to reduce their overall CO2 footprint, and to come up with ways to encourage agents to travel to work in a more environmentally-friendly manner
• Disturbingly low levels of call coaching across contact centres of all sizes and sectors, with weekly coaching a rarity, and ten per cent of agents receiving no weekly coaching at all
• Inconsistent use of agent performance metrics – while over eight out of ten agents have their calls measured for quality, under a quarter of them say their monthly pay is impacted by their performance scores
• A surprising variance in operational efficiency between the best and worst performing contact centres – 30-35 per cent differences in agent-on-call times (often as little as just five hours a day) suggest an industry that is still too inefficient, despite its comparative maturity, and one that frequently resorts to overstaffing in order to meet demand
• A clear requirement from agents for technology solutions that make it easier for them to do their jobs. The two key technology frustrations most cited by agents were the frequent difficulty they had in actually hearing customer calls, and having to use poorly performing applications that are often complex and too difficult to access. According to the research:
  - Over two thirds of agents have problems hearing calls
  - 30 per cent of agents take more than five minutes to login at the start of the day
  - A third use five or more application passwords to carry out their daily role
  - Over 40 per cent of agents experience slow running IT systems every day
  

These findings come from the UK’s first ever survey panel of close to 1,000 independently recruited UK contact centre agents which has been put together by Sabio and YouGov in collaboration with Avaya. This first ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ research project focuses on customer service issues from the agent’s perspective, and highlights some of the key concerns facing a representative sample of the UK’s 1.2 million contact centre agents who represent some four per cent of the country’s total workforce.

“As an industry we talk a lot about the customer experience, but it’s rare that we actually listen to what the contact centre agents themselves are feeling. They’re an essential part of the customer service equation, and we need to pay them more attention,” commented Sabio’s Consulting Director, Kenneth Hitchen. “We initially expected our ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ research project to identify important areas where we could further optimise contact centre performance. The findings have turned out to be much more important than that, uncovering some key areas that organisations really need to address if they’re to have any chance of delivering long-term customer satisfaction.

“As an industry it’s worrying how little time we’re spending on agent coaching – particularly in key sectors such as financial services where there’s a regulatory requirement for agents to know exactly what they’re discussing. It’s also clear that, collectively, contact centres aren’t being innovative with their staffing and are placing too much emphasis on traditional 25-40 year old staff while overlooking the potential of other more flexible age groups and part-time workers. In an industry which suffers productivity and efficiency issues each and every day, we’re missing out on significant staffing opportunities that we can’t afford to ignore,” he added.

Additional trends identified in the survey include the continued growth in public sector contact centres and the challenge this imposes on private sector agent recruitment; the requirement for more flexibility in contact centres using proven techniques such as hot-desking; and the need for organisations to take more advantage of blended customer service approaches with agents handling both sales and service calls.

According to Nick Roullier, UK Country Manager for Avaya who partnered with Sabio to develop the ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ project: “this research provides a useful insight into a number of key areas where the industry needs to do better, and highlights the importance of getting the simple things right – high quality audio calls, a simple user interface, and tighter application integration – before investing in further complexity. We believe this research project adds an important additional dimension to our view of the contact centre market, and we look forward to working with Sabio and YouGov as the project develops, building on the data from the initial project to provide deep insight into the changing views and concerns of UK contact centre agents.”

YouGov’s specialist contact centre agent research panel was formed to help investigate issues relating to agents’ working lives, contact centre performance and customer service concerns. The panel reflects the size, geographical spread and market sector split of the UK contact centre industry, and aims to identify key contact centre agent concerns including the most stressful parts of the job, their biggest technology frustrations, as well as information on how long agents actually stay in their jobs, the types of media they interact with, and how their performance is measured. Only agents who met YouGov’s panel industry sector and demographic profile requirements were selected to complete the online survey.