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Does Your Customer Service Staff Fit Your Success Profile?
By Gail Finger, Spring 2004
Often, companies minimize the importance of getting the "right" person in customer service because the role is viewed as "unskilled" and therefore not worth the time, effort, or expense. This mistake is common in a labor market like the one we have had during the past couple of years.
With many people seeking work, companies have been able to fill open slots easily. Sometimes filling a customer service slot with anyone who seems reasonably presentable works in the short-term, but long-term, it isn’t benefiting your business. When an employee doesn’t have the right mix of skills, talents, and competencies to do a superb job, your business suffers.
Customer Service departments have notoriously high turnover rates.
If your company doesn’t value assessing candidates for these positions, it’s time to think again.
Lack of attention to selecting customer service personnel can have devastating effects on your business.
- It is critical to consider the high dollar cost of frequent turnover, including impacts on current staff, managers and training.
- Customers become frustrated and dissatisfied when customer service reps can’t answer questions because they’re new.
- When reps don’t communicate in a professional manner that shows your company cares about and respects its customers, your business loses.
- Poor customer service affects customer loyalty, and no business can succeed without loyal customers.
One of the best ways to ensure that your customer service department provides high quality service is to systematically determine whether candidates fit the profile of a successful customer service representative in your organization.
Significant research has been done to define which competencies are important for customer service folks to have. The basics include:
- Good communication skills
- Ability to handle stressful situations
- Consistency
- Reliability
- Persistence
- Ability to handle rejection
- Emotional control
- Empathy
- Self-confidence
- Ability to analyze and solve problems
This information is helpful to start, but you can ensure an even better outcome by customizing a success profile for your organization. Very cost-effective, web-based tools exist for this purpose.
Each business has its own unique culture and way it wants its customers to be treated by its representatives. You may want reps to have some specific qualities that the generic model doesn’t envision. For example, your customer service staff may need to persuade, or, depending on the product or service you provide, they may need to have high attention to detail.
Creating competency models is a painless and cost-effective thing to do. Three well-known resources can help you to design your own customer service competency model and move ahead of your competition in creating lasting customer satisfaction:
- Managing For Success® has a tool for evaluating the competencies of your current customer service employees as well as for assessing how well candidates match the competency model. Click here for a sample report (pdf document).
- Praendex Corporation has two products, the Predictive Index and the PRO that help to create competency models and assess candidates’ fit. More information can be found at http://www.piworldwide.com/
- SHL has a very comprehensive approach to selecting the right employee. More information can be found at http://www.shl.com/SHL/en-int/Solutions/LifecycleEvents/Selectionlifecycle.htm
Use one of these tools to create a competency model that blends your company’s unique requirements with the basic position needs and helps you assess candidates’ fit with that profile. You’ll be on your way to building a winning customer service team!
Read more on this topic in our article Hire by Design. Not by Chemistry! and white paper Hiring by Design, Not by Chemistry.