Before You Fix the Customer Experience, Look at the Agent Experience
By Katie Bess, Founder, Agent Impact Solutions
Customer satisfaction doesn’t begin with the customer. It begins with the agent answering the call.
When we want to improve the customer experience, we tend to look at what happens during the interaction. Are agents following the right processes? Do they have the right tools? Are they communicating clearly? Do they need more coaching or training?
Those are important questions. But they leave out something that can have just as much influence on the interaction: what the agent is experiencing at work.
Agents don’t leave their work environment behind when they answer a call. If they feel informed, supported, recognized, connected, and heard, that shows up in how they communicate with customers. And when they feel disconnected, overlooked, or unsure of what’s happening, that can show up too.
The customer may never see the agent experience, but they can often feel the effects of it.
Before we look for the next way to improve the customer experience, it may be worth looking at the experience of the person delivering it.
Clear Communication Creates Confidence
Few things undermine an agent’s confidence faster than feeling like they’re the last to know what’s happening.
A policy changes. A promotion launches. A process gets updated. Ideally, agents hear about it clearly and early enough to understand what it means for the customers they support. Even in centers where communication is frequent, important updates can get lost across emails, chats, meetings, and announcements. When information is scattered, agents may not always know what changed or where to find the most current answer.
Sometimes the customer knows about a change before the agent does.
Now the agent is trying to catch up in real time, searching for information or putting the customer on hold while they figure out what changed. Even a capable, experienced agent can sound uncertain when they haven’t been given what they need to answer confidently.
Clear, consistent communication gives agents a stronger foundation. They know what is happening, what is expected of them, and where to find the information they need.
Customers may never know how well a contact center communicates internally, but they experience the result every time an agent can answer their question with clarity and confidence.
Feeling Supported Preserves Patience and Empathy
Customer service requires a lot from the person on the other end of the line. Agents are expected to remain patient, empathetic, and solution-focused, even when the customer is frustrated, the calls are back-to-back, or the problem isn’t easy to solve.
That becomes much harder when the agent feels unsupported themselves.
Support can take many forms. It might mean knowing a supervisor will step in when a situation becomes difficult, having the resources to solve a problem without jumping through unnecessary hoops, or simply feeling like someone notices when the workload has been especially challenging.
None of this means agents need a perfect workday to provide great service. But there is a difference between asking someone to handle a difficult customer from a place of support and asking them to do it while they’re already feeling frustrated, disconnected, or unheard.
That difference shows up in the conversation, whether the customer can name it or not. How supported an agent feels can influence the patience, tone, and willingness to help.
Supporting agents isn’t separate from supporting customers. The two experiences are more connected than we sometimes realize.
Recognition Reinforces the Experience You Want Customers to Have
Recognition is often talked about as an employee morale tool, but it can do much more than make someone feel appreciated. What leaders consistently recognize sends a message about which behaviors matter.
If an agent takes extra ownership of a difficult issue, shows exceptional patience with a frustrated customer, receives a compliment from a caller, or steps in to help a teammate solve a problem, those moments are worth making visible.
Not only because the agent deserves the recognition, but because other employees are paying attention too.
When those examples are shared consistently, they help define what great service looks like within the organization. They turn broad expectations like “put the customer first” into specific behaviors agents can see and repeat.
Recognition also gives employees something performance metrics alone cannot. A score can tell an agent whether they met a target. Recognition can tell them that the way they handled a customer mattered.
The behaviors leaders notice are often the behaviors they see more of. When agents see patience, problem-solving, and ownership recognized, they’re more likely to bring those same behaviors to the next call.
Frontline Feedback Reveals What Customers Are Really Experiencing
Agents have a view of the customer experience that few people in an organization have. They hear where customers get confused, which processes create frustration, what questions keep coming up, and where customers are being asked to work harder than they should.
One complaint may be an isolated issue. But when agents hear the same frustration call after call, they may be seeing a pattern long before it appears in a report.
The question is whether there’s a consistent way for that information to travel back into the organization.
Asking for feedback is only part of the equation. Employees also need to know that someone is listening. When agents repeatedly raise the same issue, and nothing seems to happen, they may eventually stop raising it. Even when a problem cannot be fixed immediately, acknowledging the feedback and communicating what is being done with it can make a difference.
Creating a regular way for agents to share what they’re hearing gives leaders another valuable source of customer insight. Just as importantly, following through shows agents that their experience and perspective matter.
Sometimes one of the best ways to listen to your customers is to listen to the people who talk to them every day.
Start With the Experience Behind the Experience
Improving the agent experience doesn't have to mean launching another elaborate engagement initiative. Often, it comes down to doing a few important things consistently.
Keep agents informed. Make sure they feel supported when the work gets difficult. Recognize the behaviors you want to see repeated. Give frontline employees a meaningful way to share what they’re hearing, and show them their feedback isn’t disappearing into a void.
None of these things are complicated on their own. The challenge is creating a consistent rhythm of communication, recognition, listening, and follow-through so they become part of how the organization operates rather than something that happens occasionally.
Customer experience strategies will continue to include technology, training, coaching, metrics, and process improvements. They should. But those investments can only go so far if we overlook the experience of the people responsible for delivering them.
Agents don’t leave their work environment behind each time they speak with a customer. Some of that experience follows them into every interaction.
So as you look for the next way to improve the customer experience, consider what your agents are carrying into the conversation.
