Never Be Satisfied: Hiring and Training Employees for Maximum Success
The customer service experience begins with hiring and training the right team.
What makes a good call centre? Is it one that constantly exceeds customer expectations? Or how about one that never fails to meet their performance benchmarks?
While both of these are essential to an effective contact centre, they’re both the end result of a much more important factor: the skill of your team.
From when the hiring process begins to the moment your agents pick up a phone, it’s the manager’s job to make sure their employees are equipped to handle the challenges of the contact centre. The process of turning your new hires into skilled contact centre agents requires proper training, constant feedback, and acclimation to the cultural climate in your business.
Hiring for Cultural Fit
What does “corporate culture” mean, exactly? You could take a stab at defining company culture as the shared attitudes and procedures that allow a company to efficiently work together to meet established goals.
A lack of a positive culture can wreak havoc with morale and decrease job satisfaction, thereby decreasing the quality of your service. Let’s take a quick look at what goes into an effective business culture:
- Corporate culture begins with the job posting: Make sure the listing that you post conveys the type of culture you want your employees to uphold. Is your culture laid-back? Formal? This will help your employees find the right fit for their own sake, and reduce employee turnover.
- Culture is intentional: A positive company culture is a direct result of management’s emphasis on a teamwork-oriented, energized, and productive work environment.
- Employees must embody the culture: Your culture is a product of the beliefs set down by management, made real by the practices of your team. It’s on the shoulders of your employees to ensure that new members are effectively integrated into this culture.
Effective Staff Training
The Global Call Center Report, performed by researchers at Cornell University, indicated that the average training time for new call centre agents was a mere 15 days. The report went on to explain that employees often needed a full 8 weeks of training before becoming proficient in their duties.
Proper training isn’t just giving your new hire the basics and then throwing them to the wolves.
Training Phase I: Meet and Greet
In the initial phase of training, your primary goal should be to introduce your new hire to your team and begin the process of acclimating them to the corporate culture that we discussed earlier:
- Meeting the team
- Learning about the business
- Understanding the importance of corporate protocols like scheduling and performance
Phase II: Hands-On Training
The second phase involves teaching them the basics of how to do their job, as well as their role in the company infrastructure:
- Having your best performers demonstrate and help with training
- Explaining the purpose of their job and where they stand in the company hierarchy
- Teaching them proper call centre etiquette and best practices for success
Phase III: Fine-tuning
The final phase relies on providing coaching and feedback, as the new hire will need specific instruction on how to fine-tune their performance:
- Teaching them how to find answers on their own
- Offering individual coaching
- Providing constant feedback and evaluation
Constant Feedback
The last step of the process is a system of regular feedback and coaching. Research done by Manchester Inc. via Balanced Executives found that coaching provided an average ROI of nearly 6 times the cost of implementation. This is where you turn your employees into contact centre super-agents.
Evaluation is a necessary part of training, but we’re not talking about the type of feedback provided by CRM systems and analytic reports. Before your agents even begin to consider shooting for the KPI benchmarks that your centre has established, they’ll need regular evaluation from supervisors that provides detail about their customer interactions and offers personalized suggestions for improvement.
Once they have the basics down, they can then start to work on tightening up their performance to meet the expectations that you have for your senior staff.
The Work Is Never Done
The process of effective training begins with your job posting and ends… well, it never really ends. The process of maintaining employee skills and improving their performance is a constant effort.
While life in the call centre isn’t for everyone, understanding the right methods of hiring, training, and cultivating your staff can help you raise a team that is effective, agile, and ready to take on any challenge the call centre can present.
Interested in more ways you can bring staff on board and make them feel like a part of the team? Download our free white paper!
