Increase your Service Advantage: Innovations in Agent Hiring

transcript

Executive Webinar Series

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Keith Dawson Practice Leader, Customer Engagement Team Ovum

Keith covers contact center technologies, including infrastructure, software, and services. His particular interest in recent years has been the customer experience: how to measure it, and how companies can use the contact center to manage that experience to their advantage. He also covers emerging service delivery technologies, including speech analytics and proactive outbound and advanced workforce optimization tools, all with an eye to understanding how organizations can best allocate resources and optimize customer satisfaction. He speaks frequently on these topics at industry conferences and webinars.

The Next Generation of Agent Hiring

Keith Dawson Practice Leader, Customer Engagement

March 26, 2014

Focus points

§  The relationship between agent performance and customer experience

§  Is there one?

§  Can it be managed?

§  The agent lifecycle

§  What is it, why should you pay attention to it, how can you control it?

§  New technologies for pipeline improvement

§  Casting a wider net means more choice, better options

§  Some best practices in agent pipeline management

Why it’s better to get it right at the beginning

One Rep Makes 5 calls per hour

= 200 calls per week

= 10K calls per year

= 30k in a typical job

lifetime Big $ at risk

How scared are you that the person you barely know is talking to 30,000 of your customers?

How much is at risk based on the behavior of a $12/hour staffer?

Recruitment is a major headache

What are your major pain-points with regard to your in-house call centre?

2.00 2.25 2.50 2.75 3.00

Ability to invest in new CRM technologies

Ability to keep up with CRM technologies

Compliance demands

Ability to mine customer data

Agent incentivisation

Establishing reliable service level metrics

Agent training

Multilingual agent availability

Retaining good agents

Managing multiple channels

Cost control

Maintaining high service quality

Technology reliability

Hiring good agents

The goals of agent onboarding

Get the right number of staff

Ensure they have the best mix of skills

Provide them with the appropriate tools

Measure their performance and ensure consistency

Propagate best practices throughout the pool

Repeat …

The lifecycle of a call center rep

Before the first call

Time on the job

Moving up or moving

The lifecycle of a call center rep

Before the first call

Time on the job

Moving up or moving

Recruitment

Pre-hire assessment

Training / Incubation

What’s changing in technology

• Ability to hear inside the content of recordings •  Isolate variables like language proficiency, clarity, or emotional

responsiveness Analytics

• Measure how well a candidate’s qualities match a profile of the desired agents

• Benchmarking against existing successful agents

Psychological Profiling

• Save recruiters time by only putting promising interviews in front of them

Automated interviews

• Make decisions based on desired KPIs like csat, sales, tenure (as predicted by assessment tools)

Outcome-based hiring

• Distributed infrastructure enables a wider net without adding costs to the hiring process Cloud

New best practices are emerging

Spend more time on determining important criteria

Audit the existing skills base and highlight replicable qualities

Avoid thinking of hiring as a set of silos

Measure performance and relate back to hiring process

Don’t just leave pipeline management to HR

How it affects the customer experience

•  Training $ savings •  Shorter incubation •  Better adaption to company •  Lower turnover •  Propagation of best

practices

Operational Benefits Improved Customer

Experience

Take-Aways

•  Have a clear idea of the requirements you need

•  Explore the new technology that can shorten and maximize the process

•  Look to turnover, sales, csat, recruiter time and other metrics as part of the cost justification for hiring automation

•  Continually benchmark actual agent performance with predicted outcomes

•  Foster interdepartmental collaboration

Questions?

Contact Information

Keith Dawson Practice Leader, Customer Engagement 646-572-3209 keith.dawson@ovum.com Twitter @keithdawson

Outcome-Based Hiring Strategies For an Exceptional Customer Experience

Typical Hiring Process Process

Step Assess.

Test Phone Screen

Phone Int. HR Int.

Supv. Int. Job Offer

Backgr. Check Onboard

Number 1,000 800 520 234 145 102 78 70

Pass Rate 80% 65% 45% 62% 70% 76% 90% ---

Duration (Biz Days) 2 10 6 5 5 2 5 35

$ Per $35 $20 $30 $35 $35 $20 $100 $1,282

Total $ $35,000 $16,000 $15,600 $8,190 $5,075 $2,040 $7,800 $89,705

Add to this: Cost to Source (typ. $750/1,000) Cost of onboarding (range: $2,000 - $6,500 each) Onboarding interval (range: 2 – 6 weeks) Time to proficiency (> 4 weeks)

Impact: Cost of Hire: $3,282 - $7,782 Effective Interval: 13 – 17 weeks

Automate the Screening Process Process

Step Digital

Int. Assess.

Test Phone

In-Person

Int. Job Offer

Backgr. Check Onboard

Number 1,000 500 400 220 143 100 85

Pass Rate 50% 80% 55% 65% 70% 85% ---

Duration (Biz Days) 1 2 6 5 2 5 21

$ Per $5 $35 $30 $35 $20 $100 $595

Total $ $5,000 $17,500 $12,000 $7,700 $2,860 $10,000 $50,560

Impact: Cost of Hire: $2,595 - $7,095 Effective Interval: 6 – 10 weeks

Benefits: Cost of Hire reduced by 54% Time-to-hire reduced by 40% Qualified hires increased by 21%

Outcomes-‐Driven Hiring

Key Driver: 90-‐Day Retention

ay “S

ate”

87% 56%

Before HireIQ

Key Driver: Performance Optimization 4

Training Training +30 Training +60

Recommended

Not Recommended

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Alpharetta, GA 30009 USA

Tel: +1.678.279.2830

@hireiqinc

HireIQ Solutions

www.hireiqinc.com

info@hireiqinc.com

Increase your Service Advantage: Innovations in Agent Hiring

Recruiting & HR