Day 1:

  1. Knowledge Retention

An agent’s mission is to provide the highest quality support to customers. To accomplish this, they need to be able to learn and memorize a good amount of information about your company. By the time they get up and running, they should at least know the ins and outs of your product or service and be on board with your brand’s philosophy.

Call center agents should know when they can’t resolve the issue and who to transfer the call to if this is the case. As time progresses, they should be able to remember answers to frequently asked questions and troubleshoot with ease. If your candidates do not appear to be the type to be able to quickly learn and retain information, hiring them could ultimately have a negative impact on your provision of support.

 

  1. Attention to Detail

Being a call center agent can sometimes be monotonous. Agents often answer the same questions and receive the same complaints day after day. The danger with this is that agents can become complacent as a result. Agents that fall into this tend to assume that they understand customer issues without seeking clarification and are prone to offering a quick, canned response.

This recipe for disaster is unfortunately incredibly common. In fact, consumers say that on average agents only answer their questions 50 percent of the time. Make sure your agents stand above the rest by checking in with customers to make sure their issues are resolved to their satisfaction before ending the call. Also, during the hiring process, if a candidate has errors in their resume, isn’t well groomed, or appears sloppy in some other way, pass them up for someone that appears to pay more attention to detail.