If you have a high turnover at your call center, then you may feel frustrated at how to attract top employees to your call center. While it’s easy to place the blame for this high turnover rate on the nature of the call center industry, the poor work ethic of Millennial employees, the economy, and many other factors that may or may not be true, this is not a productive way of thinking.
Instead of spinning your wheels trying to resolve a recurring problem – hiring people who then leave, wasting a large amount of money you spent in training them to be good at their work—it’s important to ask new questions.
Specifically, ask the following two questions:
- What can your call center do to attract, engage, and keep high-quality employees?
- What can you do to better screen candidates so that you don’t hire the wrong people?
Let’s take a closer look at both questions:
- What can your call center do to attract, engage, and keep high-quality employees?
Essentially, this question is asking you what you can do to make your call center a more fulfilling place to work. What is it that you can change in the work environment to create a positive culture to motivate employees?
Here are 3 suggestions:
- Technology:
Use the latest technology to make your call center a much more interesting place to work. Employees will do much more work, faster and better work, if hey are equipped with the right tools. The capacity to do good work is intrinsically motivating. Over the last few years, call center technology has undergone some radical innovation. For instance, many tedious tasks that bored agents to tears can now be handled by automation. Instead of an agent randomly calling people or calling people from a list and leaving a message, an electronic device called an auto dialer can do the same thing, leaving a recorded message.
How tech-savvy is your call center? Is it using integrated solutions? Is it using the latest platforms (like CRM, WFO, and WFM)? Is it taking advantage of multichannel communications? If you want a happier workforce, you have to replace old-school manual processes that slow everything down with the top trends impacting the call industry today.
- Scheduling:
Everyone has a different biological clock. Some people are bright and cheerful in the morning; others only feel fully awake by noon. In the afternoon the situation is reversed: the bright sparks tend to go into a slump the longer they work in the evening; meanwhile, the late risers start to really hum with productivity. By creating flexible schedules instead of force-fitting everyone into a rigid schedule, you will catch everyone at their most productive times. So think about scheduling your employees when their biorhythm is at its peak.
- Gamification:
Gamification uses the art and science of game design and game mechanics to engage people at work. Why would someone rather play a game of Monopoly rather than go to work? Logically, it should be more exciting to make real money rather than play money. However, Monopoly has intrinsic reward systems in place—like friendly competition, scores, colorful tokens, and so on. By comparison, a job often has a series of tedious steps to execute in an endless loop. Using gamification, psychologists have figured out how to introduce features that fascinate people in games into real world situations to improve engagement.
- What can you do to better screen candidates so that you don’t hire the wrong people?
No doubt you are probably doing all the right things when it comes to hiring people: placing ads in reputable magazines and newspapers, carefully reviewing resumes, conducting pre-screening telephone interviews, and having in-person interviews. In fact, you’ve probably improved how you write your ads, what you focus on in a resume, and the questions you ask during the telephone and live interview. Yet despite all these efforts, apparently promising candidates turn out to be slackers once they have passed their probationary period.
The solution to finding talent is to develop a more precise screening criterion. In BPOs in the Philippines, they start by filtering out the ones that aren’t qualified by looking at their resume. During the interview, they often ask situational questions to see if they are able to answer accordingly.
Here are some ways to spot a good candidate:
- · They have a past history of getting things done. In recruiting parlance, it’s called “showing a sense of urgency.”
- · They evince signs of practical intelligence instead of a history of academic achievement.
- · They have a vision of where they are going in life.
- · They have previous knowledge, skills, and experience in dealing with customers, which means that they will benefit the most from in-house training.
Try out these two ideas today to start hiring the right people for your call center.
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