The Power Within
First of all, employees usually work for a company for more than one reason. The first priority of any employee is of their own benefit.
The need to make money to support families or to work their way up the promotion line are very important in the mind of an employee, I should know as I’ve been there!
Now what keeps an employee working for a company is the way they are treated by the employer. If they feel needed and valued, an employee will want to stick around.
This is where hiring from within makes a huge difference in customer relations, believe it or not.
When a company practices promoting for higher level positions from within, it gives employees something to work toward. It creates an avenue for an employee to do their best and work to achieve a higher salary, a better job, and a nicer life altogether. This is the one reason I had chosen to make a career in call centers. There is nothing like the feeling of coming into a company starting on the ground floor, and to work your way up the chain until a secured higher paying position has been achieved. I have done this several times, in different call centers.
So how does this fit into the big picture of creating a better customer service experience for everyone involved?
It’s all in the attitude.
I went into work every single day with a smile on my face, ready to face the world. Sure, I knew there would be difficult customers to deal with as there always were. But because I knew that I had an opportunity to advance, I was determined to put my best foot forward and never look back.
When you have this type of dedication from an employee, the only outcome is sure to be positive. This type of dedication spreads like wildfire and creates a chain reaction that does a lot of good from this one particular type of customer service call center practice.
On the other hand, this can be a touchy practice because when it’s a smaller call center hiring from within it truly may not be the best option for the company. When limiting themselves to hiring from within, many things can turn awry and I’ve seen this side of it too.
Say there are a total of 70 customer service agents working for this small call center. There is a need for a new team manager, and the job was posted. There may be 30 people that apply for the position, but every one of them lack the experience, knowledge, or education needed to perform the job’s functions adequately. This leaves the company to make a decision based on pure hope instead of qualifications, meaning the company and employee alike surely hope the job will be a good fit but more often than not it only sets the employee and the company up for failure.
I remember an instance that this rang very true for a call center I worked for a couple of years ago. I was working as a team manager where we took calls from cellular customers. It was a small outsourced company with about 60 call center agents fielding calls. A fellow team manager put in their resignation as they were returning to college, which left the company two weeks to find a replacement.
The job was quickly posted for all employees to apply for this position, and everyone was very optimistic about the outcome of this situation. After interviewing every one of the 17 people that applied, it became clear that there wasn’t even one qualified candidate for the job. Because this call center’s practice was to hire strictly from within, they were left with choosing a candidate based on what they felt the person would be capable of learning, not what they were already capable of.
Finally, a person was chosen and hired for the job, very nice man who seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. He was very eager to learn and all of us team managers did our best to help him become efficient in his job. After many mistakes followed by many more trial and errors, he ended up crossing the line with a customer while taking an escalated call.
This actually lost the call center their contract, resulting in every single one of us losing our jobs!
The reason for this story is to show the down side of strictly hiring from within but it’s by no means a story to show why a call center should not hire from within.
If a company maintains a practice of first posting and looking to fill a position from within when at all possible, there will not be an issue with reaching outside of the company when necessary. This gives every employee a great opportunity for growth within the company, helping them to maintain their dedication and desire to do their best.
It also gives the company an opportunity to properly fill a job without risking operations because they had to hire someone that wasn’t qualified. The bottom line is that a company must create and maintain a reasonable way of doing business, essentially develop a mutually beneficial customer service call center practice. This means having a back up plan for every practice that is not unreasonable to ask of employees.
Following a practice of hiring from within and only looking outside the company if no qualified candidates have applied proves to be beneficial for everyone involved because it gives current employees an opportunity, while giving the company the resources they need to find the best person possible for a job that needs to be filled.
Top of Customer Service Call Center Practices
