A customer service executive is a critical role, and poor customer service is just as harmful for your business as a bad product or service. Even one bad instance of customer experience can destroy a company’s image in a market in such a way that even good PR cannot fix the situation. In a service industry, customer is the king. It means recruiting the best employees becomes a necessity to provide the best services.
A candidate who is applying for a position of customer service representative needs three important things: qualification, experience, and the right skillset. Here, skills play a significant role as it is the attitude of the person that will engage the customer and help to serve your customers better.
According to Harver, 33% of customers would consider switching companies immediately after experiencing poor service. Even worse, 95% of customers would share that bad experience with friends and family.
To avoid that, we have listed seven ways that will help you improve your customer service representative recruitment strategy. Not only you’d understand how to hire a customer service representative efficiently, you’d also learn how to hire them remotely.
- Define Your Job Requirements: The role of customer service representative has also changed with the time and is now more in demand. In recent times, the communication with customers has been an essential service for businesses. However, with time, the job requirements have changed. Hence, it is essential to highlight the job expectations and mention them clearly.
It is also important to mention what changes will occur in the job role in future so that candidate can invest in learning those new skills. Be clear with your requirements and weed out unsuitable candidates by asking them about their salary expectations and basic information before you initiate the process of recruitment. - Employ a New Approach to Discovering Talent: These days, the first-place candidates look for jobs is online platforms, such as LinkedIn, Jobvite, and even social media. Hence, to find a digitally sound candidate, you can use creative methods like posting videos and creatives on all the virtual platforms to attract more candidates.
A good customer service representative needs certain traits like good communication skills, patience, quick problem-solving abilities, etc. Hence, when recruiting, conduct an effective skill assessment, which will help you in determining whether or not the candidate has the desired skillset.
- Showcase the Growth Opportunities: The reason why good customer representatives leave within a short period is the lack of good growth opportunities.Growth in career is the most attractive thing for an employee, perhaps even more so than the pay and perks. During the interview, describe the growth opportunities, including learning and development opportunities that your company has to offer. This way, you’ll attract ambitious candidates who have the right learning attitude.
- Use the Right Tests: A customer service representative has to face situations and make quick decisions. Hence, it is necessary to use the right parameters to assess candidates. For example, a situational judgement test can give you better insights on how they may address the issues of their customers. Similarly, conducting a comprehensive language test would determine whether or not the candidates can converse aptly to your customers.
Today, conducting interviews in person can be a difficult process. Hence, conduct live interviews to effectively test the candidate. Describe what issues customers usually face in your organization and see the response of the candidate to check their decision-making skills, which are essential to be an ideal customer service representative.Moreover, pre-employment customer service assessment test can help you determine the proficiency level of the candidates. - Use Data to Map Talent: Data is widely used to make business decisions. Hence, use data to map the customer service competencies and skills that you need. Take a look at your organization to assess characteristics and skills that are required.
Also, look at the best employees in your organization and what skills make them a better employee, and test candidates on those parameters.
Another way to determine the right skills is doing a quick competitor analysis. Figure out the skills that your direct competitors require and match them with your requirements. This would also help you in establishing an industry standard. - Use Tools to Eliminate Bias and Boost Efficiency: Online skill assessment tools are the best option of assessing candidates in person as well as remotely. An ideal skill assessment for the job of customer service representative should include tests on assessing critical customer service skills such as personality, typing, general mental ability, English proficiency, etc. Multi-tasking is also one of the necessary customer service orientation skills to include as lack of this ability can reduce productivity significantly. Multi-tasking would continue to remain important as work from home continues to become the norm.
- Keep Optimizing Your Onboarding Program and Strengthen Your Brand: Hiring process is complete only after a successful onboarding. A strong brand attracts customers and also makes candidates want to work for your company. Strong brand and a good on-boarding program help in instilling brand values. A good customer service representative must be well versed with the brand vision and values. Since they are the people who interact with your customers directly, it is essential they project your brand values through their work.
So, ensuring a comprehensive onboarding program for customer reps becomes vital.
Hiring for roles that are customer facing is always tricky, which means you have to be thorough right from the beginning. In this era of Digital Transformation, this process has been made easier. Right from the moment you publish the job vacancy to skill assessment testing, technology is with you every step of the way.
