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