Agent Satisfaction Surveys are a type of survey used to understand the level of happiness customer service teams have in the work they do. These surveys are typically conducted once or twice per year to measure how satisfied customer service agents are. The result of the survey is an Agent Satisfaction Score.
Agent Satisfaction Score is calculated from the results of the Agent Satisfaction Survey. Agent Satisfaction Score (ASAT) is generally positively correlated with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), meaning the higher ASAT is, the higher CSAT will be. On the other hand, the Agent Satisfaction Score is negatively correlated with agent turnover and absenteeism, meaning turnover and absenteeism decrease as ASAT increases.
Agent satisfaction is a leading indicator that influences many other customer service metrics. The purpose of measuring ASAT is to proactively identify risks such as burnout or lack of engagement, and ensure the team is happy doing the work they’ve been hired to do.
Agent satisfaction is important because it directly impacts customer satisfaction and employee turnover. Being the first point of contact for customers, unhappy agents can lead to problematic or underwhelming experiences for customers. When employees are unsatisfied and don’t feel valued, they are more likely to start looking for other job opportunities, resulting in an increase in employee turnover.
ASAT provides an opportunity to stay ahead of these issues. It ensures customers are getting the best service possible and that employees are treated in a way that motivates and inspires them to continue showing up to do their best work.
Agent satisfaction surveys can be simple or complex. They will look different from company to company depending on the products or services you provide and how your team works.
With that being said, we recommend starting with some of these questions when creating (the first version of) your ASAT survey.
There are more ways to measure satisfaction than a survey, but it’s a great way to collect measurable data efficiently. What you do with the results of an agent satisfaction survey is what matters most. After conducting a survey, follow up by implementing additional training or policies that support improvements in the areas that need it most.
For example, your support teams’ ticket resolution time might be low because they’re not feeling valued or motivated and they’re frustrated at work. After implementing new policies and processes to improve the agent satisfaction score, you can look back at historical resolution times and compare them to the new resolution times.
If you see resolution times decrease after implementing the learnings from the ASAT survey, it’s an indication that the survey efforts were a success.
You might also have an employee turnover issue at your company, where agents are leaving the company faster than ever. Take what you learn from the ASAT survey and implement ways to make your team more satisfied with the work they’re doing. Maybe it’s burnt out, maybe it’s a lack of technical knowledge or resources. Whatever the case, use data to understand if the changes you’re implementing are working.
Here are some basic tips for rolling out an agent satisfaction survey.
Conducting an ASAT survey is a great way to understand how happy your agents are at work. While you can easily ask your agents about their level of satisfaction with their job, you’ll get a deeper level of information by conducting an agent satisfaction survey.
Conducting a survey takes some planning and preparation. Here are some things to consider.
Decide who will facilitate this project. It might be a team lead or someone else at the company not directly involved with the customer service team. Or, you might decide to outsource the survey to a research group separate from your company—it all depends on what kind of resources you have available.
The best way to ensure engagement on these surveys is to have thoughtful questions. Think of questions that will not only make the agent feel heard and understood but will also help the company guide its efforts to the most common pain points.
Once you’ve drafted the survey questions, you’ll need to select a survey tool to use. Your company might have a survey tool they’ve purchased already for other surveys. If you’re selecting a new tool, you’ll need to evaluate pricing and features to make sure it will work for you and your company. Some of the best survey tools are Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Survey Planet, HubSpot Surveys, Qualaroo, and many more.
Dial in the types of questions you want to ask based on what the customer service team is experiencing. For example, if you suspect there’s burnout, ask about whether or not the team is feeling overwhelmed with their workload.
Every survey should be tested before it is applied to the respective audience. Testing the survey on a few mock respondents ensures the survey will be understood correctly and is working properly. Send the survey to a few employees first to get feedback and see if there are any missing questions or opportunities to improve it, or any technical glitches.
Normally, this survey is conducted once or twice a year, but this will depend on the amount of feedback you want to collect and how often are you willing to improve.
Send the survey to every team member including agents, team leads, and managers. Gathering this structured feedback from the entire team creates a holistic view of both individuals as well as the team as a whole.
Once the survey is done, take time to analyze the results and conclude how to improve your agents’ satisfaction based on the survey responses. You might also decide to share the results with your team to promote a transparent culture.
Create an action plan for putting things into practice based on the survey results. This might be changes to policies and processes, new training programs, a redesigned agent onboarding process, or other opportunities for support agents.
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Have a plan for analyzing and reviewing the data collected in the survey. SurveyMonkey, one of the leaders in the survey tool space, recommend this survey analysis method. If you’re using a Google Form, link the responses to a spreadsheet so you can categorize and organize it.
From there, you can draw results such as if the team is generally satisfied with the work they're doing, save for some outliers, or if the general sentiment is one of disengagement.
This is the easiest information to analyze since most survey tools will provide an instant visual reference of the results, such as a bar chart or pie graph. Qualitative data takes more time to parse through and understand. Starting with hard numbers will give you an instant indicator of some themes and problem areas.
Correlating data is the process of understanding what responses are related to or influencing one another. For example, you might find that the more tickets an agent is handling, the more likely they are to be feeling burned out at work. This will help you make better-informed decisions by correlating your variables with the answers and visualizing patterns.
If you have any historical data, make sure it’s readily available so you can compare it with the most recent results from the survey. Comparing new data against old data will help you see if there have been any improvements in agent satisfaction since the last survey was sent.
Visual representations of the data like charts and word clouds help you understand the responses. This is a great way to present the data when sharing it with your team. As we’ve mentioned above, your survey tool likely has some built-in data visualization tools.
Drawing conclusions and sharing these with your management and leadership teams will help get everyone on the same page. Make sure your peers understand the results of the survey so they can help support you in the initiatives you take based on the results.
Keeping employees happy is critical to the success of any business. Creating a workplace environment and culture where your support agents feel valued, appreciated, and aren’t overworked will ultimately save your company money in the long run.
To a certain extent, all feedback is valuable and worth taking into account. That said, there is always the potential for throwaway comments that aren't intended to provide any actual feedback. Generally, as long as there is some constructive quality to the feedback and it isn't just a one-line complaint, it's usually worth bearing in mind.
✅ Actionable feedback: “This process is slow and clunky, and if we were to improve it, I would get more done"
🚫Not actional feedback: ”I don't like working on these cases."
Take action on the responses you can, and dig deeper into responses that aren’t clear.
As the saying goes, “Feedback is a gift”. Conducting an agent satisfaction survey will give you and your leadership team helpful feedback to make positive changes within the organization that will ultimately impact the bottom line.
While 1:1s between agents and their managers might reveal insights about agent satisfaction, these meetings aren’t always the best way to get this information. Sometimes agents won’t share feedback about burnout or other struggles out of fear of sounding like they’re “complaining”. By providing an additional opportunity to submit feedback via a survey, you can sometimes get more honest feedback.
Taking action on feedback is the best way to improve your team members’ satisfaction, which ultimately helps to reduce employee turnover.
The best way to make your employees feel good about their work is to reassure them that your company is willing to improve for them. They want to know you’re listening and truly care about them. Results from an ASAT survey might result in offering new benefits, or reducing workload while maintaining the quality of your service.
Measuring agent satisfaction can be used to indirectly measure the effectiveness of your team leads and managers. For example, low satisfaction might be a result of bad leadership and if ASAT continues to slip after each survey, it might be time for upper management to get involved and evaluate the leadership team.
While there aren’t many disadvantages to conducting an agent satisfaction survey, it can shine a light on some problems that aren’t necessarily controlled by you.
Some issues might be out of your control. For example, you might depend on a partner or third party for a certain part of your customer service, and maybe that process involves friction or frequent roadblocks. It might even be a legal process of some sort. While this can cause frustration, it’s important to communicate to your team that there simply isn’t much you can do, it’s just the nature of the job.
Some things might be in your control, but they might be a large effort (for example, switching service providers or partners). In this case, you should communicate your plans with your team so they know you’re listening to their concerns. You might not be able to act quickly all of the time, but you can certainly communicate the right information quickly. That said, you should take quick action whenever you can.
Is there an ROI for conducting an ASAT survey?
Ideally, teams with an ASAT survey would see higher employee retention and associate satisfaction if the feedback is acted upon. Often, this type of survey uncovers serious grievances that, once identified, are acted on quickly to the delight of the team.
This not only helps control program costs for hiring but can also lead to better use of resources if training for new hires isn't needed as frequently due to folks staying engaged on their team.
Ultimately, measuring ASAT helps protect revenue by keeping customers happy. If customers are faced with working with unhappy agents, customer satisfaction takes a hit and revenue is at risk.
Agent satisfaction surveys are a powerful tool to help support teams operate healthily. They teach you things you might not get from having conversations with your team, and they enable you to implement change to become a better place to work. Focusing on improving the workplace for support agents will trickle down to your customers by way of providing a higher level of service.
If you’re not currently measuring ASAT, start with a simple survey and iterate over time as you learn more about what you need to be asking your agents. By having a survey in place, your agents will feel more valued and this alone can have a positive impact on agent satisfaction.
Taking action on these surveys is the most important part of the process. There are often things directly in your control that you can do or change to improve the happiness of agents, all while maintaining a high level of service.
PartnerHero has years of experience building high-performing support teams and ensuring those teams are happy and motivated with their work. We have connected thousands of talented people from all over the world with innovative companies that truly care about the customer experience. Reach out to learn more about what we do.
