Background: Customers are the bedrock of every business’ success story and therefore hiring the right customer care executive for your enterprise is important. In his earlier article, Ramana Reddicharla explained the importance of customer service for startups. Here he shares tips to find the most suitable customer care executive.

“Hiring the best is your most important job.”- Steve Jobs 

As sales increase, acquiring the right candidate becomes the most important task especially when it comes to hiring individuals for handling customer care and customer calls. Different people have different perceptions of call centre executives. But it is the HR team and entrepreneur that needs to focus on certain characteristics of the individuals before hiring. This process is costly and time-consuming, as the entire process depends on hiring the right candidate. For selecting the perfect executive for your company, you need to follow certain best practices.

The steps for hiring talent are as follows:

• The first thing is, you need to create the profile of a good executive
• List down the idea skills, behaviour and attributes
• You have to provide your HR recruiter with a detailed candidate profile which in turn acts as a blueprint for hiring the right resource.
  
  

If you can do this, then there are high chances even if you hire a few candidates, they will be efficient in their work.

Also read: 4 unconventional ways to measure customer satisfaction

Finding the best resource is not an easy task. Keep these factors in mind when hiring customer care executives for your firm.

1. Ask the right questions

Prepare a solid list of questions that you will ask. It is very important that you ask the right questions. This will let you determine whether the candidate possesses the necessary skills you are looking for. Then you need to score them depending on the answers they offer. For that too, you need to know what sort of answers you are looking for. With this clarity, you will be able to complete the agent profile sheet, and this is crucial for all BPO companies.

Here are some questions you might want to include in your interview.

• What does customer service mean to you?
• Share an example of how you have converted a disgruntled customer to a happy one?
• What would you do if you don’t know how to help a customer?
• What qualities do you have that make you most suitable to handle customer relations?

2. Explore current hiring strategies

Discuss with your HR team about the current recruitment strategies and then identify what works and what doesn’t. You must have multiple or backup hiring strategies to explore. You may like to make use of a competency-based assessment tool as part of the hiring process. If you have this tool, it should determine the skills and the personality traits of your potential employees to a large degree. These traits are important to know whether an employee is happy and satisfied in your company. If you know what makes an employee more effective, you will know what you can provide for your newly hired team member.

3. Client handling skills

You have to make use of behaviour-based interview questions. Ask the candidate if you can provide specific examples of their previous jobs where they demonstrated the ability to handle complicated situations. For instance, you can ask the candidate, “Please tell me about a certain time when you have dealt with an unreasonable request from a customer”. This will help you know how patient a candidate is, how well s/he can communicate and finally how efficiently s/he can handle an unreasonable customer without making them angry.

Also read: Win them with your product, keep them with your service: 4 case studies

4. Be transparent

Now, you need to be completely honest about the company and yourself. Provide complete details about the company and what you are going to offer to the candidate as salary, holidays and incentive. If there are non-traditional work schedules/shifts, tell them about it openly. Give them the chance to listen to calls and then decide how well s/he can access the calls.

Hiring and retaining the best talent can be a challenge

Hiring the right resource is just the first hurdle that you encounter amongst others. Another crucial factor you would want to consider is how to retain your best performing resource in a volatile market. Employees these days are quite savvy, and thanks to the myriad opportunities that keep coming up in the market, they are tempted to switch jobs. This leads to the problem of attrition which in turn leads to loss of your service quality, which directly impacts customer satisfaction and sales. Now that’s a challenge for any business that operates in the B2C market.

Delegating HR services can help you focus on your priorities

When you outsource your customer service or tele calling requirements to an established and proven third-party provider, you take out a lot of the additional responsibilities and added pressures off the table, allowing you to concentrate on your core business operations. Say you’re an e-commerce startup that is still looking to get the supply chain and logistics division in place. When you go about setting up an in-house call centre by conducting an interview phase, shortlisting and hiring candidates, you are losing valuable time which could’ve been best utilised in perfecting your logistics and inventory management, which forms the backbone of any e-commerce firm.

Syrow’s long-standing commitment to excellence in supporting startups and small-to-medium business organisations has enabled us to streamline our hiring process to pick the right talent from a vast talent pool. If you want to solve the dilemma of hiring, you can avail our 24-hour customer service with Syrow and get in touch with us.

Also read: Customer-centricity: The bedrock of successful businesses

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