How to Hire The Best Call Center Agents
If you have a business with a call center, you likely already know it’s one of the vital parts of your customer service department. The call center’s role is to solve problems, address questions, provide help, and make customers satisfied and happy. If your agents aren’t doing their job properly (or well enough), it’s going to have a negative impact on your company. Customers may grow frustrated, go elsewhere, even leave you bad reviews and spread negative word of mouth.
That’s why it’s vital to recruit talented call center agents and train them properly. A good call center agent can make a huge difference in your customer satisfaction metrics. Here are a few ways you can make sure you’ve got the right people for the job.
Draft a Comprehensive Job Profile
In this day and age, your typical call center agent is likely doing more than just fielding calls. They’re much more likely to handle transactions, make outbound sales calls, and be using the latest customer service technology. An ideal candidate should be highly educated, positive, motivated, professional, and career-oriented. Your job profile should reflect this, so you start with a pool of high-quality candidates to begin with.
Offer Benefits
A surefire way to attract more candidates is to offer a perks and benefits package. Traditional benefits are a great start, but perks that add well-being to your employees can make a big difference. Workplace amenities such as company transportation, on-site food service, coffee shops, health clinics, and other facilities can make your call center a huge draw for candidates.
These can have added benefits for your company, as well — on-site medical care means employees may not have to leave the office and wait at a clinic somewhere, or even take the day off work (depending on the issue, obviously). Coffee shops, ATMs, and cafeterias can encourage employees to remain at the office during breaks and lunches, removing the need to deal with traffic or dealing with long lines during lunch rush. And an ATM means that when employees get paid, they can access their money right away, before they’re even out of the building.
Another thing that might not count as a traditional “perk,” but will still help attract some of the best candidates — have room for career advancement. Today’s call center employees hope and expect for more, including rich possibilities for moving up the ladder when their skills and experience warrants it. Few employees relish the thought of being in the same position forever, so it helps to make those opportunities known to prospective agents while recruiting.
Conduct Pre-Employment Tests
Having a large pool of prospective employees is a great start, but it’s far from the end. To make sure you have the best possible shortlist of candidates, do some pre-screening. Conduct pre-employment tests for things like multitasking, problem-solving, active listening, fluency in English (or relevant language), and more. It’s also useful to screen for attitude and make sure your candidates are positive, energetic, open to criticism and a good fit for the company culture.
Another way to screen ahead of time for candidates is to shortlist candidates with the relevant educational requirements and experience. This may seem pretty basic, but it’s an important part of the process and will cut down dramatically on the number of interviews you’ll have to conduct.
Develop an Onboarding Process
A particularly effective way to onboard an agent is to let them work alongside another agent. Call center training that includes a shadowing program lets agents pair up with other, more experienced call center agents so they can see first-hand how an established employee handles a call. This is a fantastic way for agents to both listen in on live calls and see how software and tools are used to make the customer service experience better. In general, this is much more effective than any presentation or binder of training materials.
Assess Soft Skills
When it comes to being part of customer service, a candidate’s soft skills are just as important as education and technical training. A good call service agent must be able to empathize with a customer’s frustrations, work well under pressure, and show enthusiasm and professionalism when it comes to their work. They must be able to listen actively and effectively, communicate clearly with customers and fellow employees, and possess good emotional intelligence.
Development of soft skills shouldn’t necessarily end with hiring, either — there’s a lot to be gained in making it part of your call center training process.
Implement a Probation Period
It would be great if every candidate turned out to be the right one for the job, but sadly that isn’t the case. One way you can make the process a little less painful is to implement a probation period for candidates. You can assess their hard and soft skills, see how they perform, and decide whether they’re the right fit for your organization.
Authored by Alexis Frasier
This post is supported by Co-Creative Marketing