Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Organizations are increasingly responding to the growing consumer demand for “always-on” deliverables in terms of information and service. As such, traditional call centers are moving more toward multi-channel contact centers that incorporate up- and cross-selling into the responsibilities of call center agents.

 

With this trend has come a change in the way that center managers and human resources departments look for and hire individuals to fill the agent role, as it is no longer enough to be able to politely read from a script. These agents must now be able to turn a high percentage of customer interactions into a sale and center managers must be able to identify the right people to fill these positions.

 

Best Practices, LLC examined this trend in a recent study and identified what elements are critical in hiring to these positions. According to one veteran call center manager participating in the study, good customer service representatives have to have that ‘sales gene’ – people skills, assertiveness, etc. Another manager contributed that personality type is the key to success in taking advantage of selling opportunities.

 

Critical areas that this study examined included personality attributes, competency-based screening, behavior-based interviews and cross-advertising call center jobs as service and sales. Best Practices set out to identify the characteristics of high performance service-sales representatives of award-winning service-sales organizations as well as effective methods to realign the hiring process to attract more sales-oriented applicants.

When looking at personality attributes, there were certain qualities that stood out as leading indicators of sales success that can help create specific hiring profiles. Most call center managers reported that strong communication and listening skills were a key hallmark of successful sales representatives. To identify these attributes in an individual, managers suggested using behavior-based interviews and role-plays.

 

The “situational challenge” interview is another common tactic that can help to identify desired behaviors. During this type of situation, the interviewer describes a difficult problem or challenge and asks how the interviewee would solve it. Top performing call centers suggest expanding talent sources to reflect local labor markets with unique sources of sales-and-service talent.

Another suggestion to find individuals for specific sales-oriented call center positions is to focus on college students. One call center that participated in the study is based in a college town and has found that students are bright and dependable employees that prefer the flexible hours and often stay with the job four or five years.

 

The biggest challenge for call and contact center managers, as well as HR, is to effectively identify the traits that are most desirable in an employee in order to be successful for a specific position. This involves not only examining the demands of the sales process, but also the qualities that will work well with the customer base. Once these elements are established, these centers will be well on their way to hiring effective and successful agents that can deliver top sales conversion numbers to drive revenues for the organization.

 

 

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.