On the surface, surveying your contact center agents may appear to be a waste of time. After all, they are taking time out of their day to answer questions instead of helping to resolve customer issues.

Why bother with surveying your agents? What’s the value behind the effort? If you’re looking to improve agent satisfaction and increase agent retention rate, a few minutes of feedback every quarter can have a significant positive impact on your business and is well worth the time.

Below is more information about understanding the value of agent surveys to optimize your workforce and how to properly capture agent feedback. Conducting a survey the right way enables you to acquire actionable information to boost your contact center productivity.

A survey is an opportunity to formally evaluate supervisor assumptions – When building out a survey, a good starting point is meeting with agent supervisors and asking them what they feel are worthy questions to ask on the survey. You can also speak to workforce management (WFM) analysts as well if you are looking to improve processes such as scheduling and intraday management.

Administer the survey online and with full anonymity – Once you have the questions finalized, it’s time to figure out how to administer the survey. The most important thing to consider when pushing out the survey to agents is ensuring you get honest and credible data. For example, if you try to do an “in-person” survey in a closed room where peer pressure influences responses, your data will probably end up skewed and may even harm your business. Instead, set yourself up to get honest responses. Give agents an official opportunity to provide feedback with an online survey that is not tied to their email address. This gives them a way to answer anonymously, which significantly increases the truthfulness of responses. Acquiring actionable data is the top priority.

Utilize agent feedback to make changes to your contact center technology stack – After the survey has been given enough time to be completed, it’s time to analyze the results to see how you can take action. The first way is to see what areas of agent feedback you can address within your technology stack. For example, if the desire for shift bidding or a more streamlined and automated time off process is strong, you can evaluate sophisticated WFM software solutions to determine which ones meet your requirements.

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Begin to develop strategies to meet less technical needs – Not all the actionable feedback that is unearthed from a survey can be addressed through technology solutions. Other items require careful planning and a personal touch. As another example, one common point of feedback on these surveys may be around career development paths. If this stands out as a top concern among agents, the senior leadership team can sit down and formalize paths for advancement for agents within your company and then communicate the paths to the greater team.

Simply put, agent surveys are a unique way to find out exactly what’s happening in your contact center. Leveraging survey results in the right way by communicating the results to your team and what you’re going to do with the feedback improves agent morale, which in turn creates better experiences for your customers.