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Call Center Agent Satisfaction Spells Customer Loyalty

Genesys has released the eighth study in its Contact Centre Realities series for Australia and New Zealand. Titled 'Optimising Agent Performance'. The latest Genesys study comes at a time when contact centers are under increasing pressure to meet the often-conflicting demands of service quality, revenue generation and cost efficiency. Although there are several aspects to address in order to meet these challenges, the Genesys research indicates that leading contact centres recognise that they need to focus on what is both their highest cost and their most valuable assets.

"Agents continue to be the face of most companies and it’s the experience they deliver to customers that has the most impact on customer loyalty," said James Brooks, senior vice president, Asia Pacific, Genesys. "At Genesys, we believe customer engagement begins with agent engagement, and turning customers into positive ‘word of mouth’ advocates and brand champions requires an emotional connection with companies that is delivered by agents."

While remuneration is important to agents it is not necessarily their biggest driver of motivation, and 75 percent of agents are most motivated by factors that engender a sense of personal satisfaction and achievement in their daily work, although only 52 percent of agents report experiencing this. The biggest agent motivator is feeling or being told that they’ve helped a customer, and a majority of their job stress relates to customer frustration and the inability to serve customers well.

The survey also reveals that there is significant room for improvement in the engagement and retention of contact centre agents:

Only 6 percent of agents want their next role to be that of a contact centre agent
70 percent of managers agree that a tighter labour market has made it significantly more difficult to hire contact centre agents

The report also identifies some of the steps that leading organisations are taking to address these deficiencies:

More than two-thirds of agents would be willing to continue working as a contact centre agent for a 10 to 30 percent increase in pay
62 percent of agents would be open to increasing the amount of cross-selling if it gave them the opportunity to earn more salary in the form of commissions
Leading-edge organisations are increasing the percentage of base salary that agents can earn as incentives and are funding this increase from their marketing and sales budgets inrecognition of their contact centres’ revenue generation skill and capacity.


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