One of the biggest detractors from contact center productivity is agent underperformance. Those who lack the necessary skills and experience to deliver consistent service not only create bottlenecks and negatively affect the morale of others on the team, they can lower customer satisfaction and damage customers’ perception of your brand. It is absolutely critical to staff your contact center with agents who are capable of coming up to speed quickly and performing well from the start.
With annual agent attrition rates averaging 30-100%, the challenge is often finding and keeping qualified employees.
Consider how much time and expense is wasted in the hiring process simply sorting through applications from unqualified candidates, not to mention phone screenings and face-to-face interviews. In an ideal world, you would be able to eliminate “bad fits” from the start and only see applications from individuals with the characteristics required to succeed in an open position.
Effective applicant pre-screening can help you raise the overall quality of your applicant pool while enabling you to focus your hiring efforts on selecting from the most qualified candidates. This unique solution allows hiring managers to easily:
- Screen candidates for relevant education, experience and contact center skills early in the hiring process.
- Test potential agents’ skills (such as business reasoning, computer navigation, audio typing, etc.) to easily identify candidates with the right abilities.
- Administer personality assessments as part of the application process to screen for desired character traits.
- Provide detailed job descriptions to candidates to reduce turnover resulting from unclear or unrealistic expectations.
- Reduce the onboarding learning curve by hiring agents with the minimum skill requirements needed to start the job.
Of course, the best pre-screening is looking at what you already have. Evaluating the skills and traits of your best performers separates your top performers from lower performers and incorporate this information in building the assessments that potential new hires take. By tying in workforce performance management analytics to your defined criteria, you can match candidates’ skill and personality traits to specific positions and flags the traits and cognitive abilities that will hinder success. This helps screen candidates and narrows the hiring field so interviewers spend time with pre-qualified candidates that are best suited for the position.
With customer experience becoming a key differentiator in today’s competitive marketplace, revenue is often literally riding on the interactions that take place between customers and agents. Businesses can no longer afford to place subpar performers on the customer service “front lines.”
Read more about Aspect Job Match and how it can help you achieve higher agent retention, increased recruiting efficiency, improved new hire productivity and elevated customer satisfaction.
