Blog Post

Customer support outsourcing: Tips on how to hire and succeed in onboarding new agents

If you finally decide to cooperate with outsourcing customer service, the most important thing is to ensure an efficient onboarding for your new agents. This way, newcomers will help you scale up your business faster.

The statistics show that 70% of customers abandon a company because of low-quality service and support.

Customer support representatives are the face of the company. Hiring the best agents equipped to work directly with the clients is crucial for your business growth. No matter how many agents you outsource, it always matters to instruct them attentively to run efficient customer support onboarding. Otherwise, you risk getting stuck in endless troubleshooting instead of focusing on priorities.

Scroll down to find a piece of useful advice and learn how to hire & onboard customer service agents.

Life hacks on how to hire customer support representatives

What are the main responsibilities of agents? That’s right. They should provide your clients with proper and timely support to increase their loyalty. But there still are businesses that pass by the importance of hiring expert employees.

Selecting a perfect candidate for this position is like looking for a needle in a haystack. First of all, you should set some criteria to narrow down the pool of candidates before onboarding outsourcing support. Here’s what to consider:

Professional background. Your potential employee should have experience working in customer service, answering calls, or servicing customers at the shopping space.
Skills. You need to hire a person with essential customer service skills such as diligence, politeness, understanding of your specific industry, interpersonal skills, etc. What is more, customer support representatives must be able to provide support through various channels (calls, live chats, emails, social media platforms, etc.).
Personal traits. Hire customer service that can take care of your clients in the best possible way, so hire a polite, empathetic, and hard-working person. A potential agent must be interested in your brand and fit in with your team.
Positive attitude. A representative of your brand has no right to complain to clients about their problems or bad days. Agents must convince a customer that your company can fix any problem, no matter what.
Enthusiasm. Are the candidates just searching for a new job, or do they want to work for your company? There’s nothing wrong with a person who wants to land a job. It’s better to choose someone less qualified who would be excited to join your team than an apathetic agent with more experience.

Selecting the most suitable candidates, conducting interviews, and providing organizational socialization might be time-consuming for companies. However, experienced outsourcing customer support allows them to manage client care work without over-hiring or letting agents go in the low season.

4 tips on how to conduct customer support onboarding successfully

Infect Them With Your Brand

This part of onboarding is essential. If you want your reps to deliver great customer service, they must understand the product in-depth. To engage your agents, you should tell them about your company’s mission and voice, emphasizing that each one of them is a brand ambassador.

Next, you can think of motivation. Remember, benefits always work. If you truly strive to engage your outsourced customer support, you should treat them as though they are your in-house team.

Organize Effective Training

If building a team spirit is a warm-up, an effective onboarding session for call center agents is the next crucial stage. Experienced outsourcers can process your existing guidelines and turn an informal session into a hands-on script. Besides, please take control of the negotiation process and cover the following issues:

Your company’s mission, values, and voice.
Customer persona.
Product features and metrics.
Ticketing system.

Those are the key aspects you should discuss first. However, management can extend the list as per your personal needs. For instance, if you’re using some extra software, you need to talk it over and provide additional training if necessary.

Set Up Measurable Goals

Setting up KPIs is necessary to turn customer support outsourcing into a win-win situation. Usually, there are two common groups of KPIs:

The first one is used to measure a team’s productivity, e.g., to call abandonment rate, follow-up time, etc.
The second one serves to estimate customer satisfaction. It includes:

Query age.
Call frequency.
First, call resolution.
Several escalations.

Additional indicators vary depending on the business niche. For example, if you haven’t experienced outsourcing customer support before, collaborate with your outsourcer, define KPIs, and the expected period to reach them.

Ask Outsourced Customer Support for Reports

We’ve worked on multiple projects and learned that reporting is a potent tool. It helps you monitor the progress, make more evident-based decisions, increase productivity, and simplify the overall collaboration process. Moreover, it enables you to provide on-time changes and prevent critical mistakes.

Conclusion

So, what is outsourced customer service? It doesn’t always mean cheap out-of-date call centers. Modern outsourcing customer services fully integrate online, mobile, and landline communications. It can become flexible extensions of your team or your faithful remote partner.

Outsourcing is not just about cutting costs. It’s also about completing tasks efficiently and maximizing workforce flexibility. Hire a customer service support company to catch up with one of the most significant business trends. There are a lot of services that help you ride the wave. Just choose the right one wisely!

If you’re looking for reliable outsourced customer support – tell us about your needs and requirements. We’ll gladly share our experience and best practices with you to accelerate your business development.