What is Agent Experience (AX)?

Agent experience (AX) refers to the overall experience of the contact center agent across their physical environment, mental well-being, morale, financial well-being, and their experience in doing their jobs. The current state of agent experience leaves much to be desired. Agent churn is anywhere between 30%-50%, depending on whom you ask, one of the highest across job types.

Agents face many hurdles in their job that impact agent and customer experienceThe state of agent experience

Psychology Today

Agents have an average of 10 hostile encounters with customers per day

RAND/Harvard/UCLA study

 … verbal abuse was much more common in customer service jobs

Multiple sources

Agent churn of 30-50%, with next-gen agents likely to leave within a year

Reasons for poor agent experience: Ineffective productivity tools

According to Gartner,

  • 84% of contact center agents do not think that their desktop tools help in resolving customer issues
  • Agents navigate across 8.2 different applications on average to answer a customer question

In an exclusive agent-only survey conducted by BenchmarkPortal, a leading contact center benchmarking organization,

  • 63% of agents said customer queries are getting more complex but 64% of them do not have any tools to guide them through customer conversations
  • In the same survey, 33% of them confessed they read through voluminous documents when the customer is on the line, not good for AX or CX for that matter

In a digital-first, and often digital-only world, agents are struggling with desktop tools designed for phone customer service in the 1990s.

Reasons for poor agent experience: Missing knowledge

We sponsored an online survey of contact center agents in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and the Asia Pacific region through SurveyMonkey®. Contact center customer service agents participating in the survey were asked to list their biggest pain points while delivering customer service.

Pie chart of the biggest problems that agents face when a customer is on the line

26 percent  |  Finding the right answers to customer questions

25 percent  |  Different systems / information sources give different answers

20 percent  |  Hopping from one application / window to another

14 percent  |  Hard to keep up with all the new information/changes I need to know about

This trend was the same for agents across Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland, and Asia Pacific and points to a need for knowledge in the contact center.

Download survey infographic


Thought leadership from Forbes
The Looming Contact Center Agent Experience (AX) Crisis And What To Do About It

Benchmark Portal whitepaper
Agent Experience (AX): The Next Frontier for Elevating the Customer Experience (CX)


Why is agent experience important?

Agent experience impacts customer experience (CX)

Your braveheart agents are in the line of fire of your angriest customers. When customers reach them over chat or phone, they are out of both patience and time. They are already frustrated at their unsuccessful attempts at self-service.

Your job is to equip your agents with the technology and knowhow that will help them deliver the quality customer service they are expected to provide. When they can’t, you have dissatisfied and disloyal customers, harried agents, and an attrition rate of almost 50%.

Fact: Happy agents equal happy customers


What you can do: Upgrade agent experience from harried to happy in 2 steps

1. Try the Advisor Desktop in 30 Days service

The “Advisor Desktop in 30 Days” service makes it super-easy for contact centers and customer service organizations to implement a digital-first, omnichannel advisor desktop for quick business value.

About the 30-day service

2. Get eGain Advisor desktop

eGain Advisor is eGain’s digital-first, omnichannel desktop, guided by AI and knowledge. Once you’ve tried the 30-day agent desktop pilot, get it.

About eGain Advisor Desktop


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Challenges faced by an omnichannel customer service agent today.

Start with a risk-free, no-charge, production pilot. Talk to us now to learn more!

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