Stay updated!

What is Agent Effort Score?

by UJET Team

We know that being able to track customer happiness is vitally important to your business. If your customers are unhappy, it won’t be a surprise if they decide to leave.

Your support team is on the front line with these customers; they’ll know when customers are experiencing issues or having trouble with the product. Each agent’s ability to support the customer has a drastic effect on the overall customer experience.

Agent Effort Score is a way to track how easy it is for your team to support customers. Much like Customer Effort Score, Agent Effort Score gives insights into how easy it is for your team to get their jobs done. You can use this metric to find places where improvements can be made and make changes to internal processes or tools to help your agents give the customer a better experience.

Why use it?

Agent Effort Score is a satisfaction survey that measures how easy it is for your agents to support the customer by asking a single question.

On a scale from Very Easy to Very Difficult, how much effort is required to successfully resolve a customer’s issue?

You can use this metric to gauge how the internal processes, tools and applications your team uses on a daily basis are either helping or hindering their productivity.

To complete the survey your agents will need to reply with one of the following answers:

  • Very Easy = 1
  • Easy = 2
  • Neither = 3
  • Difficult = 4
  • Very Difficult = 5

 

Each answer is given a point value. As shown above, each response carries a value that is used in the equation to find an average score. With these results and the score average, you get a general sense of how your tools and internal processes support or detract from agents’ daily tasks. This is a great way to find potential friction and track how well your agents can support customers.

How to calculate Agent Effort Score

Once the survey is complete, you’ll need to calculate the total Agent Effort Score. This is done by taking the total sum of every agent’s answer and dividing it by the total number of people who responded to the survey.

agent effort equation

In this example, we’ll be using a team of 50 agents, all of whom responded to the survey. 15 of them answered Very Difficult, 10 answered Difficult, 15 answered Neither, and 5 each answered Easy and Very Easy. First, you’ll need to calculate the sum of answers:

  • Very Easy: 1 X 5 = 5
  • Easy: 2 X 5 = 10
  • Neither: 3 X 15 = 45
  • Difficult: 4 X 10 = 40
  • Very Difficult: 5 X 15 = 75

When we add these answers together, the total is 175.

agent effort score calculation

In our example, the total Agent Effort Score is 3.5. The higher the score, the more effort your team needs to put in to get the results they’re looking for. The goal is to get the Agent Effort Score as low as possible.

Why you should be tracking Agent Effort Score

There are a number of different metrics you can track to gain insight on the performance and productivity of your contact center team. While metrics like average call time, one-touch resolution, and satisfaction scores are excellent for measuring the output of your team, they don’t provide insight into how much effort your agents need to put in to achieve the desired results.

You can use surveys like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) internally, but they fall short of giving you the ability to find points of friction in your agents’ day-to-day tasks.

CSAT is a great way to track issues between different departments within your company, but it does not reveal any insights into how agents interact with internal tools and processes. The CSAT score will only tell you how well your team is rated by other departments within the company.

NPS is a way for you to get a pulse on how satisfied your agents are with their current situation. While it is one way to spark a conversation on overall agent happiness, the NPS is not specific enough to provide actionable takeaways when applied to how easy or difficult it is for your agents to do their jobs.

customer service agent

The Agent Effort Score will give you exactly what you need to know. Using Agent Effort Score, you can have specific conversations with the team about what processes or tools are causing friction in their daily tasks. You can use the score as a benchmark for how well your team is functioning internally and track how that improves or declines as new processes or tools are rolled out.

Your score is also a great way to find out which agents are having difficulty with a particular tool or process. If you have some members of the team answering Difficult or Very Difficult, while the majority of the team is Easy or Very Easy, that highlights an opportunity for outreach.

With Agent Effort Score, it becomes simpler to reach out and support the agents who are having difficulty. For example, you can also pair them with other team members, who aren’t having difficulty, for additional training.

Make it easy for your team to support customers

Being able to support the customer is one of the most important things for your customer support team. In many ways they are the face of your company, and if their job is made more difficult by a certain internal tool or process, it’s important that you know.

Using the Agent Effort Score, you can easily track the effort it takes for your team to accomplish their tasks, highlight areas where there is potential friction, and make changes based on their feedback.

Tracking how easy or difficult it is for your team to support customers can provide valuable insights into how your team is growing and scaling with the business. Any improvements can be celebrated and any difficulties can be worked on and resolved.

By making it easier for your team to support the customer, you’ll increase not only agent happiness, but you can move the needle on customer happiness as well.