Curious about the real meaning of ASAT? ASAT stands for Agent Satisfaction Score, a key metric that tells you how satisfied your customer service agents are in their roles. 

Measuring ASAT helps leaders identify burnout, reduce turnover, and improve customer outcomes.

Agent Satisfaction Score is calculated from the results of the Agent Satisfaction Survey. 

Agent Satisfaction Score (ASAT) is generally positively correlated with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), meaning the higher ASAT is, the higher CSAT will be. 

On the other hand, the Agent Satisfaction Score is negatively correlated with agent turnover and absenteeism, meaning turnover and absenteeism decrease as ASAT increases.

Agent satisfaction survey and meaning, explained

Agent satisfaction is a leading indicator that influences many other customer service metrics and KPIs. 

The purpose of measuring ASAT is to proactively identify risks such as burnout or lack of engagement, and ensure the team is happy doing the work they’ve been hired to do. 

Agent satisfaction is important because it directly impacts customer satisfaction and employee turnover. 

Being the first point of contact for customers, unhappy agents can lead to problematic or underwhelming experiences for customers. 

When employees are unsatisfied and don’t feel valued, they are more likely to start looking for other job opportunities, resulting in an increase in employee turnover. 

ASAT provides an opportunity to stay ahead of these issues. It ensures that employees are treated in a way that motivates and inspires them to continue showing up to do their best work.

Agent satisfaction survey questions

Agent satisfaction surveys can be simple or complex. They will look different from company to company depending on the products or services you provide and how your team works. 

With that being said, we recommend starting with some of these questions when creating (the first version of) your ASAT survey. 

• What is your current role?
• How long have you been working with us?
• On a scale of 1-10, how much do you like your coworkers?
• On a scale of 1-10, how much do you like your job function?
• How often do you receive feedback from your manager?
• How satisfied are you with the skills you’re learning?
• How much do you think you are contributing to the company’s success?
• How satisfied are you with your salary?
• How satisfied are you with your job benefits?
• How satisfied are you with your manager?
• How satisfied are you with your growth opportunities?
• How satisfied are you with the company?
• How can we improve your satisfaction at work? 
• How would you describe your experience at the company?

These questions offer a strong foundation for your first survey and help clarify the ASAT meaning in practice—measuring the day-to-day realities that impact agent engagement, satisfaction, and performance.

Keep it focused, actionable, and adaptable to your team’s needs.

Measuring the success of an agent satisfaction survey

There are more ways to measure satisfaction than a survey, but it’s a great way to collect measurable data efficiently. What you do with the results of an agent satisfaction survey is what matters most. 

After conducting a survey, follow up by implementing additional training or policies that support improvements in the areas that need it most.

For example, your support teams’ ticket resolution time might be low because they’re not feeling valued or motivated and they’re frustrated at work. 

After implementing new policies and processes to improve the agent satisfaction score, you can look back at historical resolution times and compare them to the new resolution times.

If you see resolution times decrease after implementing the learnings from the ASAT survey, it’s an indication that the survey efforts were a success.

You might also have an employee turnover issue at your company, where agents are leaving the company faster than ever. Take what you learn from the ASAT survey and implement ways to make your team more satisfied with the work they’re doing. 

Tips for conducting a meaningful agent satisfaction survey

Here are some basic tips for rolling out an agent satisfaction survey.

• Implement technology: Use a survey tool that will help you create the surveys, collect the data, and provide visual reports of the responses. There’s a ton of tools out there, but even a simple Google Form is a good place to start.
• Carefully choose the questions: Take time to figure out what types of questions you want to include in the survey. Make your agents feel valuable when responding to the survey. 
• Improve based on the feedback: Once the survey results are in, take time to analyze the responses and review them with your leadership team, as well as your direct reports. Use this information to then implement new things to help move the needles in the right direction once the next survey is conducted. 

These simple tips can make a big difference in how effective your survey is—and how well it reflects true ASAT meaning. 

By using the right tools, asking thoughtful questions, and acting on feedback, you create a feedback loop that improves both agent satisfaction and overall team performance.

The agent satisfaction survey process

Conducting an ASAT survey is a great way to understand how happy your agents are at work. While you can easily ask your agents about their level of satisfaction with their job, you’ll get a deeper level of information by conducting an agent satisfaction survey. 

Conducting a survey takes some planning and preparation. Here are some things to consider. 

Choose who’s in charge of conducting the survey

Decide who will facilitate this project. It might be a team lead or someone else at the company not directly involved with the customer service team. 

Or, you might decide to outsource the survey to a research group separate from your company—it all depends on what kind of resources you have available.

Conduct research to create questions

The best way to ensure engagement on these surveys is to have thoughtful questions. Think of questions that will not only make the agent feel heard and understood but will also help the company guide its efforts to the most common pain points.

Select a survey creation tool 

Once you’ve drafted the survey questions, you’ll need to select a survey tool to use. Your company might have a survey tool they’ve purchased already for other surveys. 

If you’re choosing a new tool, you’ll need to evaluate pricing and features to make sure it will work for you and your company. Some of the best survey tools are Google Forms, Survey Monkey, Survey Planet, HubSpot Surveys, Qualaroo, and many more.

Create the survey

Dial in the types of questions you want to ask based on what the customer service team is experiencing. For example, if you suspect there’s burnout, ask about whether or not the team is feeling overwhelmed with their workload.

Test the survey

Every survey should be tested before it is applied to the respective audience. Testing the survey on a few mock respondents ensures the survey will be understood correctly and is working properly. 

Send the survey to a few employees first to get feedback and see if there are any missing questions or opportunities to improve it, or any technical glitches.

Choose the survey’s frequency

Normally, this survey is conducted once or twice a year, but this will depend on the amount of feedback you want to collect and how often are you willing to improve. 

Send it to every customer service team member

Send the survey to every team member including agents, team leads, and managers. Gathering this structured feedback from the entire team creates a holistic view of both individuals as well as the team as a whole.

Analyze the results

Once the survey is done, take time to analyze the results and conclude how to improve your agents’ satisfaction based on the survey responses. You might also decide to share the results with your team to promote a transparent culture.

Take action

Create an action plan for putting things into practice based on the survey results. This might be changes to policies and processes, new training programs, a redesigned agent onboarding process, or other opportunities for support agents.

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Analyzing ASAT survey results

Have a plan for analyzing and reviewing the data collected in the survey. SurveyMonkey, one of the leaders in the survey tool space, recommend this survey analysis method. If you’re using a Google Form, link the responses to a spreadsheet so you can categorize and organize it. 

From there, you can draw results such as if the team is generally satisfied with the work they're doing, save for some outliers, or if the general sentiment is one of disengagement. 

Start with looking at quantitative data

This is the easiest information to analyze since most survey tools will provide an instant visual reference of the results, such as a bar chart or pie graph. 

Qualitative data takes more time to parse through and understand. Starting with hard numbers will give you an instant indicator of some themes and problem areas.

AI-powered survey tools can help a lot by automatically tagging qualitative feedback, summarizing large volumes of comments, and generating insights into agent sentiment—making it easier to detect patterns and proactively address concerns.

Correlate the data

Correlating data is the process of understanding what responses are related to or influencing one another. For example, you might find that the more tickets an agent is handling, the more likely they are to be feeling burned out at work. 

This will help you make better-informed decisions by correlating your variables with the answers and visualizing patterns.

Use historical ASAT data

If you have any historical data, make sure it’s readily available so you can compare it with the most recent results from the survey. 

Comparing new data against old data will help you see if there have been any improvements in agent satisfaction since the last survey was sent.

Create graphs for better visualization

Visual representations of the data like charts and word clouds help you understand the responses. This is a great way to present the data when sharing it with your team. 

As we’ve mentioned above, your survey tool likely has some built-in data visualization tools.

Make meaningful conclusions from your ASAT survey

Drawing conclusions and sharing these with your management and leadership teams will help get everyone on the same page. Make sure your peers understand the results of the survey so they can help support you in the initiatives you take based on the results.

The importance of a good ASAT score (happy support agents)

Keeping employees happy is critical to the success of any business. Creating a workplace environment and culture where your support agents feel valued, appreciated, and aren’t overworked will ultimately save your company money in the long run.

• Employee happiness = more productivity.
• Unhappy employees will likely result in a high turnover.
• Happy employees will be more likely to become engaged in your company activities.
• Increased creativity from the team since they will be motivated.
• Lower absenteeism because they will feel valued at your company.

Addressing agent concerns

To a certain extent, all feedback is valuable and worth taking into account. That said, there is always the potential for throwaway comments that aren't intended to provide any actual feedback. 

Generally, as long as there is some constructive quality to the feedback and it isn't just a one-line complaint, it's usually worth bearing in mind. 

✅ Actionable feedback: “This process is slow and clunky, and if we were to improve it, I would get more done"

🚫Not actional feedback: ”I don't like working on these cases."

Take action on the responses you can, and dig deeper into responses that aren’t clear. 

Benefits and ROI of ASAT

As the saying goes, “Feedback is a gift”. Conducting an agent satisfaction survey will give you and your leadership team helpful feedback to make positive changes within the organization that will ultimately impact the bottom line.

Increased awareness of team health

While 1:1s between agents and their managers might reveal insights about agent satisfaction, these meetings aren’t always the best way to get this information. 

Sometimes agents won’t share feedback about burnout or other struggles out of fear of sounding like they’re “complaining”. By providing an additional opportunity to submit feedback via a survey, you can sometimes get more honest feedback.

Helps improve the agents’ satisfaction

Taking action on feedback is the best way to improve your team members’ satisfaction, which ultimately helps to reduce employee turnover.

Makes your agents feel valued

The best way to make your employees feel good about their work is to reassure them that your company is willing to improve for them. They want to know you’re listening and truly care about them. 

Results from an ASAT survey might result in offering new benefits, or reducing workload while maintaining the quality of your service. 

You can measure your leadership effectiveness

Measuring agent satisfaction can be used to indirectly measure the effectiveness of your team leads and managers. 

For example, low satisfaction might be a result of bad leadership and if ASAT continues to slip after each survey, it might be time for upper management to get involved and evaluate the leadership team.

Is there an ROI for conducting an ASAT survey?

Ideally, teams with an ASAT survey would see higher employee retention and associate satisfaction if the feedback is acted upon. 

Often, this type of survey uncovers serious grievances that, once identified, are acted on quickly to the delight of the team. 

This not only helps control program costs for hiring but can also lead to better use of resources if training for new hires isn't needed as frequently due to folks staying engaged on their team.

Ultimately, measuring ASAT helps protect revenue by keeping customers happy. If customers are faced with working with unhappy agents, customer satisfaction takes a hit and revenue is at risk.

The meaning of ASAT and its impact on support team

If you're not measuring ASAT yet, now's the time to start. Understanding ASAT meaning is the first step toward building happier, more productive support teams—and improving your customer experience in the process.

Focusing on improving the workplace for support agents will trickle down to your customers by way of providing a higher level of service.

If you’re not currently measuring ASAT, start with a simple survey and iterate over time as you learn more about what you need to be asking your agents. 

By having a survey in place, your agents will feel more valued and this alone can have a positive impact on agent satisfaction.

Want to delve into more topics about customer service, support, satisfaction, and more? Check out our blog. 

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