Quantifying Stress for Customer Service Agents at Expedia Group
We’ve all had the dreaded experience of needing to contact customer service, whether it’s because something went wrong with an order, you need support setting a product up, or you simply have a question that cannot be resolved scouring a brand’s website. Long wait times, cultural differences and a lack of resolution can lead to frustration as a consumer, but how do these interactions impact customer service agents? I sought to answer this question for customer service agents at Expedia Group™ by examining their work-related stress.
At Expedia Group, we have a hefty toolkit for examining traveler sentiment toward our products and brands. In fact, the team I’m a part of is dedicated in its entirety to improving the traveler experience through a variety of measurement tools (see this article on how we measure traveler trust). One of my first projects upon joining the team was to expand our breadth by developing a dedicated metric to quantify agent sentiment. Measuring the agent experience is critical for several reasons. From a business metric standpoint, agent annual turnover in the call center industry is estimated to range from 30% to 45%. These numbers vary based on the specific company, but are nonetheless alarmingly high. Agent turnover can be costly, as companies are forced to face the choice of hiring and training new agents or suffering the consequences of longer wait times for consumers. One major factor leading to high agent turnover rate is stress. High agent stress leads to negative customer service experiences, which can have cascading effects on customer loyalty and brand trust. For example, a recent survey conducted by OnePoll showed that having just one negative customer service interaction can lead users to abandon a brand entirely.
By monitoring and working to decrease agent stress over time, companies can improve the agent employee experience, retain more agents, and improve the consumer-facing support experience more broadly. Despite this, existing measures of workplace stress aren’t specifically designed for agents and are quite lengthy. These measures further lack measurement validity and render linking agent stress with relevant outcomes difficult. Without a clear way to measure agent stress, we can’t improve it. This article describes a new framework for agents developed at Expedia Group that articulates stress as a key measurement goal. I first discuss the measurement development and validation process and end by suggesting avenues for future work in this space.
