YouGov is aiming to recruit around 2,000 UK contact centre agents to join a new specialist research panel to investigate issues relating to their working lives, contact centre performance and customer service concerns.

Agents wishing to become a member of YouGov’s contact centre panel should visit www.yougov.com/recruitment/01 where they will be able to register to join.

With over a million people - or three per cent of the UK’s working population - now estimated to be employed as agents, the contact centre industry is one of the country’s most significant employment sectors, but one as yet where the agent’s opinion is rarely heard. YouGov’s new panel will reflect the size, geographical spread and market sector split of the UK contact centre industry, and aims to identify key contact centre agent concerns including the most stressful parts of their job, their biggest technology frustrations, as well as information on how long agents actually stay in their jobs, the types of media they interact with, and how their performance is measured.

YouGov already has hundreds of agents who are members of its UK panel, but the research company is looking to grow this number and build a large pool from which it can gather the opinions of about 1,000 agents who can collectively represent the ‘Voice of the UK contact centre agent’. Agents who meet YouGov’s panel profile requirements will be selected to complete online surveys relevant to both their industry sector and personal demographic profile.

According to Caroline Gaskin, Consulting Director at YouGov: “programmes such as Channel 4’s recent Phone Rage documentary again focused on the challenges faced by the UK contact centre industry, but it’s rare for anyone to stop and listen to the views of the actual agents who are at the heart of every customer interaction. With our UK Contact Centre Agent initiative we’re keen to provide a platform for what contact centre agents actually think about issues. We’re looking to recruit enough agents to our panel so we can provide our research customers with a statistically sound ‘voice of the UK agent’.

“Once we’ve completed our recruitment phase, we believe we’ll have a panel that can provide our customers with a distinctive base for their research projects. We expect our panel of agents to offer a new perspective on some of today’s key customer service issues, as well as a very valuable resource for longer-term research projects,” she continued.