Contact Center Experience Definition

What is contact center experience?

Agent experience is what contact center agents encounter every day as they do their jobs. It’s influenced by a wide variety of factors, including training, technology, supervisors, schedules, customer interactions, company policies, and more. The agent experience is important because it affects agent satisfaction, which in turn impacts the quality of service they provide to customers. It also impacts absenteeism and turnover – two big issues that most contact centers struggle with.

The agent experience begins with the hiring process and continues through the exit interview. The customer experience, it’s the sum of many factors and it’s cumulative. Unfortunately, with average annual agent turnover at an estimated 50%+ in the contact center industry, there’s clearly some work to be done. Being an agent is a very tough job, between content moderation demands of violent content and unruly, often-savage customers.

Some people will resign due to the nature of the job. But others quit for reasons that can be managed and improved – reasons such as incompetent supervisors, technology that doesn’t provide answers to customer inquiries, not enough recognition, or toxic culture.

Contact centers that want to be successful in the experience economy aren’t just focusing on the customer experience – they’re also improving the agent experience. No brands that outsource to contact centers want consistent turnover. It means re-training, and in the process of that re-training, the brand suffers because the agents don’t represent the brand properly. Focusing on true agent experience, or contact center experience, allows BPO vendors to please their clients and have a mostly-happy roster of agents.