The HR department has a variety of different projects and tasks to work on throughout the course of a week. One of the key tasks in a contact center includes hiring the best agents to deliver your customer service. But with everything HR employees have on their plates, it can be extremely frustrating to go through the interview, selection, and hiring process only to find an employee who doesn’t turn out to be right for the job. In addition, sometimes there are no full-time HR staff and the task of hiring a new agent is given to a customer service manager. Whether your company has an extremely busy HR staff or the duty of finding and hiring new employees is given to a manager outside of the HR department, it is always helpful to have some guidance on finding the right hire. In his recent article, Jeremy Watkin provides nine steps to hiring the best contact center agents for your company, which he learned after years of working as a Customer Service Manager.
1) Describe the Job Well
Be very clear in the initial job description and interview everything the job entails, including technical expertise in addition to customer service skills. This reduces the amount of quick turnover as a result of the new hire misunderstanding, or never being informed of, their expectations.
2) Hire For a Particular Schedule
The cold hard reality is that contact center schedules can be unpredictable. Companies want their customer service available at all times during every day of the year. It’s best to be transparent with the potential hires regarding the potential work hours so that they don’t go into the job expecting a traditional 8-5 job.
3) Conduct Phone Interviews
The obvious reason for this is simple: it allows you to hear a sample of how your candidate would sound on a customer call. If you can’t understand what they’re saying on a quick phone screening, you’ll know right away if you should save the time on bringing them in for an interview.
4) Test For Job Skills
Watkin recommends utilizing questionnaires on customer service philosophy along with technical or practical examinations such as typing and writing skills, social media profiles to see if they could work on client social media accounts.
5) Conduct Peer Interviews
Having multiple people in an interview enables the decision maker to have different notes and perspectives on a potential new hire. If you hold peer interviews, it lets the existing team give their input on how the person would fit with the group’s work culture. Selecting a person who will fit their new team is a lot easier when you see them interact with potential co-workers.
The remaining four steps to hiring the best contact center agents for your company can be found in the original article by Jeremy Watkin. These steps include offering a job preview, taking an HR class, making the first day memorable, and creating a great work environment.
This blog post is based on an article from ICMI. To read the original article, please click the link below:
9 Nuggets of Contact Center Hiring Wisdom – Jeremy Watkin
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