Are Bots The Key To Providing Outstanding Customer Support?

Customer support services are essential to keep your business running smoothly. Your support center staff are the frontline of your customer interactions. It's important to choose the right people who have the experience needed to provide relevant information, share your message, and keep your customers happy.

Disruption of traditional customer support service

Covid-19 has changed the way people interact with businesses. Customer service has become more important and more difficult in recent times. Consumers demand quick and seamless multi-channel support, and building that capacity into your workflows is expensive and resource-intensive.

Unfortunately, recruiting, training, and sustaining a customer support center staff in North America is a great investment in money, time, and effort. Operating in North America costs more in terms of building space, labor costs, and utility costs. Not to mention, an in-house call center needs to be directly supervised by the business too.

In fact, companies now need to re-imagine the post-covid world. They need to incorporate strategies to maintain a balanced consumer experience between the brick & mortar stores and the digital channels while combating economic hard times.

Your customer support  is often the differentiator

A great customer service representative requires a particular set of skills, yet these positions have a higher-than-average turnover rate. According to statistics the average ‘lifespan’ of a US call center worker is approximately 3 years, with a turnover of 33 percent.

With this, it can be tempting to remove live contact center representatives from the equation and rely on automation, or bots, to be the first point of contact for customers reaching out with questions or looking for support. But before you do so, ask yourself if you’re really willing to leave something as pivotal as customer support with a robot that has no ability to exhibit empathy, understanding, or compassion?

Contact Centre Automation Lacks Empathy in Customer Support

While chatbot automation can be efficient as it uses fewer resources, it simply cannot express empathy or any other human emotion.

When a customer contacts your center, they expect to speak with a human being that expresses understanding and emotion and can follow the story that brought that customer to that point. Perhaps your product or service didn’t perform properly and caused a significant problem for a customer.

When that customer reaches out to your company for a solution, are you comfortable letting a bot take care of it? Do you trust that bot to react to the customer’s emotions in a way that will help them find a solution that fits the specific problem being discussed?

While it’s clear that human staff at a contact center are far superior to automated bots, how do you recruit, train and maintain this team in a resource-efficient way that allows your business to continue to operate profitably?

Contact Centres Using Pre-Hire Assessment

For many companies, outsourcing their contact center services is the best solution. It allows them to maintain a team of well-trained, dedicated, empathetic human resources to communicate with their customers while saving them time and money often invested into recruiting, training, and maintaining these teams.

For every company, repeated sales and customer retention is the ultimate goal. With fragile customer loyalty, they need to ensure that they are available for their consumers 24x7 because unavailability may mean they might never hear back from them. To better translate the ROI(return on investment) of every cent invested in customer service, many North American giants such as Target, The Bank of America, and Amazon have outsourced their call center operations in developing countries such as India and the Philippines.  

Outsourced contact centers generally rely on pre-hire assessments for their hiring practices. Pre-hire assessments use real-life scenarios to accurately measure the candidate’s oral and written communication skills. The assessments take the candidates through simulations of call, chat, and email conversation situations that they will regularly face in their new role. They assess that the candidates you hire have a positive attitude, attention to detail, and the ability to listen to their customers and solve their problems thoroughly and efficiently.

The objective results remove subjectivity from your decision-making, helping you staff your contact center with a team you can trust to represent your brand and your products or services in a long-term capacity.

How Pre-Hire Assessments Benefit the HR Team?

Human Resource leaders are responsible for the company's people and culture. But when it comes to volume recruiting for call center employees, manual hiring and training is something you just don’t have time to do. However, at the same time, you recognize the importance of call center employees and would never want to trust their role to a robot.

By relying on a trusted partner to source your contact center candidates using pre-hire assessments helps build the team, save you time, money, and still have confidence that your company’s message is being shared by well-qualified, well-trained employees.

As your business expands, outsourcing your call center employee evaluation and hiring can assist you in maintaining high-quality customer support.

Here are the top 5 benefits of using pre-hire assessments for evaluating customer support employees that can’t be overlooked.

Benefit #1

There's no reason to be concerned with High Call Center Turnover

Benefit #2

There's no reason to be concerned with Finding Quality Candidates For Your Support Team

Benefit #3

There's no reason to be concerned with Scaling Up To Meet Peak Season Demands

Benefit #4

There's no reason to be concerned with Investing In The Training And Development Of Call Center Employees

Benefit #2

There's no reason to be concerned with Deploying Adequate Resources To Facilitate The Screening Processes