Contact Centre Selection

Background
A telecommunications infrastructure support company approached us to make improvements in its recruitment practices for contact centre staff. The client had suffered significant turnover problems in the contact centre which combined with rapid growth was beginning to threaten its ability to deliver its client commitments. Our client was also losing a significant number of potential candidates because the recruitment process was taking too long and candidates lost interest or found a job elsewhere.

The contact centre provided telephone support with phone systems, voicemail and desktop computers. The contact centre staff needed to be familiar with the technology as well as provide a friendly and efficient service in a number of European languages.

Our Approach
We conducted a thorough analysis of the contact centre role. We found that although there was a need to get to grips with the technology, there was not the requirement to be a graduate, which our client had firmly believed was the case. We put a case forward that the key attributes for success in the role were

• Good interpersonal skills conveyed in a friendly and helpful telephone manner
• Enthusiasm and motivation
• Common sense.

Our client accepted our suggested changes to the person specification and we moved forward to design a recruitment and selection process that would deliver this new breed of contact centre agents.

We designed a recruitment campaign, in partnership with our preferred advertising agency. This generated an enormous response of 15 candidates for each position. We used the client’s technology to ask applicants to respond verbally by phone to a number of competency based questions. These were used as an initial assessment but every applicant was phoned back for a brief telephone interview. After all, they were applying to do telephone based support work so they should be able to handle a telephone interview well. This proved to be an effective shortlisting mechanism.

Shortlisted candidates were invited for a short (half day) assessment centre which included

• A specially designed telephone based role play simulation
• A specially designed screen based work planning and prioritisation exercise that required applied common sense
• A competency based interview
• A service and stress focused personality questionnaire

The exercises were constructed so a very quick evaluation could be made meaning that those candidates who were successful in the assessment centre were given a final interview and offer of employment the same day.

Client Outcomes
Our client was delighted with the outcome of our work

• Their vacancies were all filled in 3 months
• The time from advertising a vacancy to an employment offer being made was reduced to a maximum of 2 weeks
• Their clients gave regular positive feedback about the quality of the support being provided – something that did not happen before!
• The client’s HR team was trained by us to manage the assessment centre themselves
• Turnover of contact centre staff had reduced from 30% to 5% 18 months after our intervention
• Some clients increased the amount of support being contracted from our client across more business units in broader geographical locations because of the consistently improved service they were getting.

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