SKILLS REQUIREMENTS
Personal Effectiveness
Today’s contact center agent requires personal effectiveness skills and values that demonstrate agents can work with customers, co-workers and management. This includes interpersonal skills such as demonstrating concern for others. Agents must know how to emphasize with customers. Empathy isn’t taught in the new hire training, it is expected that agents come with this ability upon being hired.
Every employer is looking for the agent that displays integrity by showing accepted social and work behaviors. Agents behave ethically through responsible use of company time and property. Personal effectiveness values include dependability and reliability. Agents that value being on time, fulfill job obligations without the distraction of attending to personal business. Contact centers look for professionalism in maintaining a professional presence and adhering to ethical standards. Agents that know how to show up dressed for work and comply with the dress code every day without any questions.
Contact centers look for agents that demonstrate commitment to effective job performance. They are motivated to do a great job by completing work assignments on time and look to achieve results in everything that they do. At every opportunity agents demonstrate a commitment to self-development and improvement. They can learn and incorporate classroom and on-the-job training into work performance.
These agents demonstrate flexibility and adaptability changing with work requirements and demands. These are the agents that get the special assignments, pilot programs, anything that requires quick learning and new focus and direction.
Academic Requirements
Contact centers need agents that can solve customer problems utilizing critical and analytical thinking skills and applying basic academic skills. Can the agent use a logical thought process to analyze information and draw a conclusion?
Can the agent use basic mathematics? Agents are required to understanding data on a customer account or use basic math calculations to add a $5.00 fee to a service, for example. Agents need to interpret agent metrics, graphs and reports for continuous self-improvement.
Agents need to be good, very good at a list of things; listening and speaking are obvious yet it is amazing how many agents are unable to do either. Many agents fail with basic sentence structure, grammar and word usage. Because agents want to decrease talk times they speak super fast and the caller has no clue what was said. The caller is left frustrated.
To be an effective agent, agents need to be able to “Touch Type” on a computer keyboard with all ten fingers using complete sentences; no emoticons or texting abbreviations. Many contact centers today provide agents with dual monitors due to the number of applications they have open at one time. It is expected that agents be comfortable with those two monitors on the desk. Customers demand confidence. They don’t want to hear about your computer challenges.
Today’s agent should know how to use and manage basic office applications like email, chats/instant messaging, basic Word and Excel, how to use the Internet to find information. Today’s agent is resourceful and locates, reads and uses information to solve the customer’s issue. Knowing how to find information and use it is essential to agent success.
Industry-Specific Technical Competencies
Contact centers utilize insurance agents, financial advisers, mortgage bankers, collectors, help desk techs, nurses, doctors, sales people and travel and hospitality.
Each industry may have its own licensing/certification requirements as well as compliance regulations. Contact centers can choose to provide the licensing classes or elect to hire agents that already possess a license.
Workplace Competencies
Industry Content Supporter:
Stephen Paskel
VP, Senior Technology & Global Operations Manager
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-paskel
You can eliminate staffing issues when outsourcing. You don’t have to hire, train, or fire agents ever.
You don’t even need a recruiter, saving your company money! Companies that provide 24/7 support often utilize overseas contact centers for after-hours support. It can be difficult and expensive to hire and run second and third shifts stateside.
Outsourcers are a great solution for overflow calls. Overflow calls can be easily handled with an overseas contact center, especially when both the companies are utilizing the same contact center platform. This makes it very easy to open queues when service levels exceed expectation. A great resource to use when call volumes are high and you are short agents. You can bring up the overseas center quickly and bring service levels back to normal much faster.
There are many benefits to using overseas contact centers; it just might not be the cost.
Industry-Wide Service Center Competencies
Industry-wide service center competencies are specific to contact centers. For example, quality assurance as it pertains to phone calls. How and why are agent’s calls recorded and listened to? Do agents demonstrate the ability and willingness to take feedback for personal and professional development?
HIPPA and PCI regulations create company policy and procedures for agents to follow keeping them in compliance with local, state and federal regulators. Many industries require agents to complete regular compliance courses and training to minimize noncompliance and company risk.
Even the contact center phone system is specific to the contact center. Logging into a queue is not like picking up the phone and getting a dial tone. Contact center technology includes CTI’s or screen pops with agent scripts, surveys and customer information. Agents hear terms like ACD, skills based routing, and the metrics they are held accountable like “average talk times, schedule adherence and call abandonment are just a few. Understanding workforce management and how it manages the agent’s schedule as well as the schedules of all agents.
Many industries use customer service and basic sales skills. At minimum agents, should demonstrate building rapport, communicating effectively with multiple generations and cultures handling upset callers and managing difficult situations. Upsell, right sell and cross-selling requiring asking problem solving questions, handling objections, presenting features and benefits, and closing questions.
INDUSTRY SERVICE TIPS
1. You get what you expect. Set the bar high with standards of excellence. Employees will meet you there if you expect it.
2. Attitude is 90% of success; you can’t teach employees with bad attitudes but you can teach those with great attitudes anything.
NEXT STEPS
Companies expect contact center personnel to have soft skills and technical skills, product, company and industry knowledge and professional workplace attitudes and values as well as read, write and add 2+2.
The job of a contact center agent is challenging and the more prepared agents are to handle the many situations of the day the more productive your new contact center will be. Don’t skimp on minimum agent requirements.
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INDUSTRY EXPERTS
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NETWORKING FOR CONTACT CENTER PROFESSIONALS
ABOUT NACSMA
NACSMA brings together like-minded professionals focused on advancing the customer contact industry and creating career growth.
BEST-IN-CLASS
Management of a best-in-class contact center sites require the continuous review of Agent Sourcing Models, Organizational Training and Management Development Programs.
NACSMA MEMBERSHIP
NACSMA is a professional, non-profit association whose members represent customer contact organizations and the vendors who support them.
IMPLEMENTATION
When a contact center organization expands to an additional site or requires new space, the steps to properly implement are unique to each organization but do have standard phases.