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Staffing For the Upturn

By Brendan B. Read

If there is an upside to the downturn is that it has given savvy contact centers breathing room in that they can be much more selective than in the past when hiring employees. It has also given them an opportune slack period that they can use retool their staffing processes to ensure that they have enough skilled quality personnel to handle increased demand in the upturn.

With companies focusing more on customer retention rather than relentless acquisition agents must be expert in hard skills such as sales and support, soft ones like empathy, and multiple languages where needed, in written as well as voice, to keep and grow customers. To effectively manage these employees contact centers need to bring aboard supervisors who can enable strong results in productivity and in agent loyalty and retention.

Modeling Agents and Supervisors

The key to hiring the right people is knowing beforehand what you expect from them. Jeff Furst, founder and CEO, FurstPerson, recommends creating staffing models or profiles. To do that contact centers need to understand their business objectives, define their centers’ jobs through a job analysis process, and understand which performance metrics drive their objectives and how their competency profiles relate to these metrics. They must determine pre-employment assessments to evaluate agents against these competency profiles, validate that candidates’ scores correlate with performance metrics (i.e. as scores increase, CSAT increases) and “rinse and repeat” to drive continuous improvement.

“For contact centers that have a sophisticated hiring approach – that they have modeled out what an above average performer ‘looks like’ – they can systematically evaluate candidates quickly and objectively against this model,” says Furst.

Berta Banks, president, Banks and Dean, recommends adopting a best practices approach: looking into, adopting, and adapting methods, tools, and processes that work for similar and successful organizations. To implement it you need to engage your people from senior leadership to line managers and align them to the new strategy and win their commitment to support turning this plan into results.

Best practices also means communicating a compelling reason why should people work for your firm. You need to motivate prospective employees to put in their applications.

“It will take some effort on your part to uncover what attracted your best people to your organization, why they stay, and what features of the job itself are appealing to people who are good in the role,” says Banks. “But once you have this understanding you can develop a compelling marketing message for the job.”

One of these compelling reasons for people to seek work with and stay at contact centers is the right environment. And that means hiring and training excellent supervisors. These individuals can inspire strong loyalty and performance from employees. The reverse is also true, and unfortunately all too common. Poor supervision can drive productivity into the tank, turnover into the sky and scare away quality agents.

“Supervisors’ abilities to develop, coach, motivate, and manage teams will drive organizations to higher levels of performance,” points out Dina Vance, senior vice president and leader of Ulysses Learning’s Call Center Practice. “Questionable supervision exists today because most supervisors have come from within the ranks with little to no development. If supervision is impacting turnover and tenure, then the development path for supervisors needs to be reconsidered not the hiring practices.”

Contact centers can reach outside to proven supervisors and managers that have worked in other centers or in similar sectors like retail and hospitality. On the other hand hiring from within confers another important benefit by creating a career path for new agents, which helps with retention.

“The key is to have a validated research based hiring process for selecting supervisors,” says Furst.

Staffing For New Communications

There has been slow but steady increase in the use of and growing customer preference for written communications: chat, e-mail, SMS/text, and social media. Yet this trend is posing challenges for many contact centers as they are finding out that their voice agents may not write well and/or use these tools effectively.

Oscar Alban, principal global Market Consultant, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions says contact centers must adjust their hiring requirements to draw in candidates that are highly skilled in chat, e-mail, and IM, as well as proficient in communicating via the written word. Yet too many of them have been focused on voice only despite the new channels.

Contact centers, he says need to attract “candidates that either have a background in leveraging such technologies, or the ability to learn quickly. [Also] it will be important to identify agents who can communicate via written channels from the existing labor pool, and train them on process and procedure.”

Should contact centers hire voice/written multichannel agents or instead recruit specialized staff? Depends on the organization.

“Some organizations still have such a small volume of chat/e-mail contacts that it does not make sense for them to hire specialized agents – yet,” says Furst. “Organizations, especially those with consumer based technology products, have high chat/e-mail contact volume that it makes sense to hire specialized agents. As long as the hiring profile has been carefully created using job analysis methodology and the hiring process has been validated, either approach can be successful.”

New Recruiting Avenues

When contact centers are ready to hire they need to pick the best avenues. That means a careful analysis of the ones available. The new and rapidly newer routes of attractive websites with pre-screening tools, along with job boards and online advertising are beginning to displace traditional print ads and walk-ins. John Hoholik, executive vice president, sales and marketing Evolv on-Demand sees this happening because these new channels are less expensive and they can assess applicants’ computer skills: which they can do to some extent online.

Social media is emerging as a new recruiting tool, an extension of informal word of mouth. Yet it has not been proven to effectively deliver the numbers of new hires that many contact centers need.

“Social media is interesting but our experience is that social media recruiting cannot drive the candidate volume for most contact center recruiters when compared to the effort to manage these campaigns,” says Furst.

Instead FurstPerson continues to see that best in class hiring contact centers will drive 30 to 50 percent of their hires from employee referral programs. That of course requires contact centers to be excellent places to work.

Teleservices firm InfoCision offers an excellent illustration of this. It uses a blend of newspapers and online job resources connected to them, newspapers, employment web sites, job fairs, billboards, radio, social services organizations, and referrals to recruit staff. This last one is enabled by InfoCision’s exceptional range of employee benefits, including fitness centers and wellness clinics that it continues to add. In spring 2009 it opened the InfoKids on-site child care at its Akron, Ohio headquarters.

Contact centers should look into specialized employment programs that connect specific and high qualified labor pools with jobs. One of the newest and largest of these groups, on account of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, are military veterans. Employers say there are few individuals more motivated, who can take pressure, and who are true team players than those who have served their countries. Contact centers can accommodate both able-bodied and the service-disabled in bricks-and-mortar and home office locations.

The U.S. Army has a recruitment program, Army Partnership for Youth Success, which enables post-service employment for its personnel, carried out in partnership with employers who agree to hire honorably discharged soldiers who had enrolled with PaYS when they joined. InfoCision is one such contact center employer who has enlisted with Army PaYS. It recently received an e-mail from a soldier currently serving in Iraq inquiring about what types of positions it offers; he is interested in being interviewing when he gets out in April.

“This partnership with the U.S. Army PaYS program offers us another way to attract dedicated and talented employees to our company and provide our soldiers with a solid opportunity for employment after serving our country,” explains InfoCision Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Steve Brubaker.

Quality Screening Methods

There are a growing range of methods and tools being adopted by contact centers to recruit and screen staff to meet agent and supervisor profiles. Ulysses’ Vance recommends using three types of interviews to obtain the full spectrum of the would-be hires. These are Pattern: covering the basics such as skills and learning about applicants’ backgrounds, Situational: allowing candidates to “live a day in the life of”, and Peer: permitting prospects to talk with peers to understand the expectations from their viewpoints.

Furst recommends data driven, research-backed pre-employment assessment models, automated voice testing to measure speech clarity, web-based solutions that objectively screen candidates against predictive hiring model and simulations to test candidates’ abilities. These tools, when necessary should be customized to specific needs. As an example his firm has come out with a new hiring process for tech support reps that is improving quality of hire for its clients by up to 30 percent.

The new solution helps staffing managers identify candidates who have a better understanding of technical issues, can explain these well to customers via the phone or chat, and perform at a higher level. It screens to competencies are critical to successful performance including compliance, composure, computer skills, dependability, listening, oral communication, probing, problem solving, stress tolerance, and tact.

“Many companies assume that technical knowledge or interest in technology is the key competencies for successful technical support representative performance,” says Brent Holland, vice president of research and consulting at FurstPerson. “[Yet] our in-depth review showed that many support reps lacked the ability to learn and apply complex information effectively. Closing this gap as part of a comprehensive pre-hire screening process yields significant gains for on the job performance.”

Evolv on-Demand’s Evolv Foresight Suite 2.0 offers reading comprehension/grammar and computer navigation and literacy assessments. It features a side-by-side applicant comparison that improves recruiter efficiency by allowing them to directly compare candidates with similar profiles and assessment scores. An Individual Trainer Tracking keeps trainers accountable by providing post-training performance and retention metrics for classes that they have. The solution’s simulations have improved screening accuracy and provide more realistic applicants’ interfaces.

Such tools can make a difference in more efficiently finding the right employees. PlumChoice provides outsourced tech services; all of its support reps are U.S.-based working from home. Over the past 14 months it has deployed behavior-based interview and assessment tools from AchieveGlobal, ProveIt from Kenexa, and Brainbench that improved its resume-to-hire ratio from 17:1 to 5:1.

Berta Banks recommends that organizations figure out the roles and functions of the positions to be filled and competency qualifications and measurements before laying out the money for recruiting and screening solutions to figure out what they need. Contact centers should also look at adding behavioral tools to your process for their high predictive capabilities; these objective assessments, such as her firm’s “Optimism” solution, add stability to the measurement process.

“Meaningful change in recruitment, has often taken a backseat to the magic wand of technology solutions,” she points out. “Yet the real solution and tools for successful recruiting are within your reach. Bringing structure and best practices to your recruiting process is no different from following the business rules and process created for every other area of your business: it is the basis for ensuring a reliable outcome.”

Staffing For The Home

More contact centers are going home. And that means finding, and screening for the right agents and supervisors who can work in that environment: namely the ability work to independently, and who can solve problems, like fixing minor computer/or phone glitches.

There are solutions to assist with assessing home agents. Evolv on-Demand has updated its computer diagnostics tool that allows hiring organizations with at-home talent to assess applicants’ computer specifications and broadband connectivity speed.

Banks and Dean found that many of the skills and experience qualifications that make a good brick and mortar agent are transferable to the home agent role. Its behavioral research into the attitudinal traits associated with optimism and performance and retention in various contact center agent roles found a remarkable similarity between home agents and traditional agents.

“So if we are transferring current successful agents, we only need to assess whether they can perform well in a home-work environment, with the different level of direct supervision and coaching that will be offered,” says Banks. “Remember, your agents are not the only staff that will need to be able to perform in this environment – also examine your team managers for fit as well.”

The following companies participated in the preparation of this article:

AchieveGlobal
www.achieveglobal.com

Banks and Dean
www.banksanddean.com

Brainbench
www.brainbench.com

Evolv on-Deman
www.evolvondemand.com

FurstPerson
www.furstperson.com

Kenexa
www.kenexa.com

Ulysses Learning
www.ulysseslearning.com

Verint (News - Alert)
www.verint.com

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