5 Tips for Hiring the Best Customer Service Representatives

Tips for Hiring the Best Customer Service Reps

Customer service is extremely crucial for every enterprise, regardless of the business or industry sector. Because that is where the customer is.

Customers generally interact with customer support and not any other division of your business, directly. The long-term strength of your brand and organization depends on having the appropriate people in those customer-facing roles and putting them in positions where they can flourish. 

Even a single interaction can make or break your reputation as a brand. No matter how great your product is or how much money you spend on promotion, if the customer is not satisfied with your brand’s assistance, it all goes down the drain.

And honestly, this is not what we’re making up, there are facts to back it. Consider these:

  • 94% of responding customers stated that a positive customer service experience made them more likely to purchase again. (Statista)
  • 73% of consumers rank CX as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. (PWC)
  • 82% of customers would recommend a company based solely on excellent customer service. (Statista)

Given these facts, you may now realize how important the customer experience is and how much is at stake. You need to be aware of the customer service competencies that your team needs to possess, as well as how to build these skills for customer service and find customer service representatives who have them. 

Here are our top 5 tips on how to hire customer service representatives.

Know the right time:

Understanding the ideal time to expand your team with more customer-service agents is crucial. A new hire’s training period and increased pay make hiring a long and expensive process. 

The team leader should have a firm understanding of whether they need a new member or not. Although there is no ideal remedy, there are specific important indications to watch for. 

The most obvious thing to check is whether the team in place can handle the incoming tickets at that particular time. If there are numerous open tickets and no one to handle them, if the team is expressing stress, it might be a smart idea to hire a new member. The contact centers indicators like AHT, FCR, NPS, CSAT, and others must be examined from a quantitative point of view. A hole in the customer support team’s operations exists if these measures show a constant decline. Hence, it might be feasible to hire a new member so that these metrics can come up to power with the requisites of your enterprise. 

These parameters can be quickly checked, numerous reports can be obtained in a matter of seconds, agent performance can be simply tracked, and daily accomplishments can be shared, with Kapture’s omnichannel dashboard.

Understand what you are exactly looking for:

You must have a clear idea of what you are looking for in a new employee before even starting the hiring process for your customer service team. Before even writing the job description, all the necessary qualifications—including the necessary customer service attributes, relevant experience, educational requirements, etc.—should be clearly laid out. 

Any person with experience in dealing with customers could make a strong contender for you. Everything will qualify a candidate for a customer service position, including taking orders in a restaurant, returning calls, and assisting guests at a reception.

Basic customer service skills

When it comes to soft skills, some of the top  customer service attributes to look for in your perfect candidate include: 

Empathic listener and persuasive speaker:

One of the most important customer service attributes to look for in your new customer care representative is empathy. The last thing an irate customer wants when they call, use social media to contact the business, or engage in live chat with the company is to be cut off or misunderstood. You want your customer service representative to patiently hear the customer’s issue, put themselves in the customer’s shoes, and then move on to the next steps. 

At ease with omnichannel ticketing: 

The present and future of wonderful CX is omnichannel ticketing. Customers today ask for assistance using whichever medium suits them best: email, chat, social media, and more. Look for candidates who have an innate customer service attributes and who are at ease providing help in an omnichannel setting when hiring.

Optimistic & Problem Solver: 

The least a representative could do is offer a small glimmer of hope and assurance that their problems are being heard and that a solution will be made available to them as soon as possible when exasperated customers contact your business and expect instant solutions. Positivity is about the words you use to speak with your clients as a component of customer service. The way a client views service can significantly change based on little word choice variations. 

Prepare a pertinent Job Description:

The job description is the voice of your brand when it comes to attracting new candidates. In order to avoid attracting candidates you don’t want and to quickly filter the candidate pool, it must be accurate when it comes to the abilities and needs that must be presented. 

When evaluating a job offer, 75% of job seekers take the company culture and workplace demographics into account, while 39% of applicants said they would turn down a company without inclusive policies. Hence, you must provide information about your company’s work culture and what is expected of the candidate from a team viewpoint along with the description of the job positions. Long-term success will result from your ability to hire people who are aware of and eager to put forth the work necessary for their positions. 

Last but not least, consider where you’ll post your job description once you’ve finished putting it together. Just keep in mind that the goal is to find the best candidates, not necessarily a large number of applicants.

Bonus tip: Look first at some of the more niche employment boards. They’ll appeal specifically to the applicants you wish to take into consideration.

Screening & decoding that stand-out resume:

The real work has just begun. You’ve received a lot of applications; how do you decide which ones to shortlist for interviews? 

Here are a couple of things you can do:

Screening Questions:

Employing a simple screening question to measure their communication skills as one of the customer service attributes during the application process is something that you might want to consider. Make it a question with a simple response, because you want to assess their ability to communicate the solution back to you because the point here is to check their clarity of providing their responses, not anything technical whatsoever.

Assess their cover letter:

The next step in determining whether a prospect is suitable for an interview is to evaluate their cover letter. Resumes may analyze and explain a candidate’s experience and educational qualifications, but a cover letter provides a more detailed review of their accomplishments and suitability for a customer service role. It not only gives you a fair idea of their communication skills, but it also shows you how enthusiastic they are about customer service and how excited they are to be working with your company.

Conduct interviews:

The most crucial thing to do once you’ve been shortlisted is to perform the interviews. Because how can you tell whether a candidate is competent enough for customer service, for your team, whether they will be able to adjust to your team, and whether they are technically sound, with only one phone conversation or meeting?

Always look for personality while hiring during interviews. Training is simple for skills like managing an omnichannel ticketing dashboard, an AI chatbot, API integrations, etc. Using these pointers, you should be able to identify potential customer service representatives who have the traits necessary to successfully represent your brand. 

Give them the opportunity to experience it:

Whatever empathy, problem-solving, effective communication, etc., the applicants may possess, it won’t matter if they can’t put those talents to use in actual life situations. Give them real-world issues to resolve, like real-time inbound tickets, and observe their behavior. These assignments will offer you a broad idea of how the candidates will act in the workplace. Will they be able to handle challenging situations, negative tickets, or more subtle scenarios?

Conclusion:

So, now that you are aware of the significance of selecting the appropriate candidates for customer support positions and possess the necessary knowledge on how to hire customer service representatives, you are prepared to begin. You should be aware of one additional thing, though.

Customers today are more sophisticated and busy. When customers call with an issue, it’s generally after they’ve attempted to fix it on their own and failed. By the time customers get in touch with the support staff, they want the problem resolved as soon as possible and in-depth. 

Instant resolution can be provided when your agents are empowered and they have all the information they need to resolve queries. 

With Kapture, you can employ an AI-powered agent assistant to scan and analyze the customer’s problem and offer contextually intelligent solutions to your agents helping them create swift resolutions. 

Are you an enterprise trying to offer wonderful CX? Talk to our product squad: schedule a demo today!

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