Call Center Staffing: How to Overcome Your Hiring Issues

For many companies that operate their customer service call center internally, staffing is an ongoing concern. This is currently an even larger concern in an environment where the national unemployment rate is only 3.8%.  This can be both daunting and frustrating. With that in mind, here are a few tips on overcoming hiring issues:

How can you overcome your hiring issues?

• Hire a recruiting firm that specializes in call center staffing. Recruiters may know the marketplace better. They can provide input on where to look for and uncover and secure top talent for their clients. They can provide advice on the current wages necessary to drive applicants to your organization.
• Make the most of social media. Post alerts about new openings and encourage social followers to share. More importantly, post about your company and your culture. It is a very competitive marketplace, so why should someone choose to work for you over another call center?
• Enlist your current employees. Referrals are a key source of new recruits. Current employees can speak first-hand about what their job entails and the working environment. Motivate and reward your employees with incentives if they make referrals.
• Renew your focus on retention. Retaining a current, qualified employee is far less costly than recruiting a new one, and employees who love their job are most likely to promote your call center in a positive light to prospects.
• Increase wages. Make sure you are offering a competitive wage, or it make not happen.
• Broaden your benefits package with non-traditional offerings your employees are asking for.
• Never stop building relationships with candidates because fluctuating needs are a hallmark of most call centers. You will always need a backup list of qualified people to call.
• Give yourself more time.  It is unlikely that you will find people who are unemployed and qualified to do the quality work that is important to you.  It takes time to compete and attract new recruits, it takes time to interview and select, and it takes time for qualified applicants to give proper notice to their future ex-employer.  The whole process is going to take longer, and recognizing that up front and allotting for that extra time could make all the difference.

Outsourcing May Be the Answer

We mentioned earlier the possibility of hiring a recruiter. Outsourcing the recruiting function may help, however you may also want to consider if this the time to work with an customer service outsourcing company, or at least a good time to discuss your situation with an outsourcer. They may have the type of people you are looking for because recruiting, training, and managing qualified talent is what they do for a living.  

And if the tight labor market is going to be around for a while, outsourcing your customer service function may be a longer term solution.

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Analytics

 

1.)

Alvaria Noble IQ Turn business insights into actionable intelligence. Noble’s IQsolutions provide you with rich and robust customer data that can transform your business. Automate decision making and campaign management and refine the quality of interactions with precision and efficiency. We have developed proprietary and patented tools to help you make sense of data on your current operations and then help you make strategic decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Identify who your best customers and prospects are and the ideal methods to reach them. Understand what types of campaigns work best for your business and how to optimize underperforming campaigns. And nake real-time decisions rather than looking back to see what went wrong.

2.)

BPA Quality Call Center Quality Monitoring Outsourced call center quality solutions including Multi-lingual, Multi-Channel Quality Monitoring, Call Center Consulting, Psychometrics & Analysis of Customer-Agent Interactions, Cloud-based Quality Analysis Software configured by Needs, Virtual & In-person Training, Speech Analytics & Speech Analytics Management.

3.)

Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.

4.)

DialogTech DialogAnalytics™ Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more. AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away. With DialogAnalytics, you can get a... (read more)Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more. AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away. With DialogAnalytics, you can get all the pre-call data on the caller and the marketing interaction that drove the call. This helps inform your call routing, the conversations your agents have with customers, and, with AI, your marketing team can analyze conversations to help them take the best actions to drive better quality sales calls to the call center.

5.)

eGain Corporation eGain Analytics eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.

6.)

Pointel CXi - Customer Experience Insights Pointel CXi, the IVR analytics platform, maps the entire customer journey and analyzes calls end-to-end to turn data into actionable insights. Centralized reporting is essential for seamless customer journeys, as it is critical to know where calls are transferred or abandoned. CXi generates multiple reports on IVR performance, the Customer-IVR interactions, and sticking points in the IVR that cause customers to struggle. CXi’s IVR Analytics platform provides a comprehensive understanding of customer engagement. Pointel Customer Experience Insights (CXi) delivers actionable information that enables businesses to reduce customer effort, operational costs and increase contact center effi... (read more)Pointel CXi, the IVR analytics platform, maps the entire customer journey and analyzes calls end-to-end to turn data into actionable insights. Centralized reporting is essential for seamless customer journeys, as it is critical to know where calls are transferred or abandoned. CXi generates multiple reports on IVR performance, the Customer-IVR interactions, and sticking points in the IVR that cause customers to struggle. CXi’s IVR Analytics platform provides a comprehensive understanding of customer engagement. Pointel Customer Experience Insights (CXi) delivers actionable information that enables businesses to reduce customer effort, operational costs and increase contact center efficiency. This helps contact centers optimize employee engagement, operations, and customer experience.

7.)

PRILINK SIP-Trunk Demarc Monitor Analyzes SIP signalling and RTP audio stream of every call passing through the network demarcation point. Provide a real time 24/7/365 network baseline database that contains the IP bandwidth, call traffic of up to 128 voice groups, Call Detail Record (CDR), call blockage and MOS voice quality. All information are displayed in SIP-Trunk dashboards and are used in many applications, such as Telco collaboration, UC/CC analytics, Work Force Optimization (WFO) and caller identification.

8.)

Vads Social Media Analytics Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions. Typical objectives of Social Media include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, getting feedback on products and services and improving public opinion of a particular product or business division. Key the activities involved: Analyzing net sentiment score Qualitative and quantitative of sentiment analysis Measure the emotions (6 Emotions) of the consumers Mapping out all potential advocates Measuring a nationwide consumer sentiment Unlimited data extraction & cleaning Customized positive and negative keywords Qualitative and quantitative insights & report writing Measuring the consumer sentiment

9.)

QPC Ltd. QPC Live QPC provides realtime unstructured and structured data analytics solutions and services to contact centres globally. We provide a complete end-to-end customer integrated offering powered by a Multichannel Intelligence Gateway which collects and inter-relates all customer interactions, from each and every customer contact across an entire contact centre ecosystem, all in real-time. We also provide solutions for conversational and interaction analytics with solutions from our specialist portfolio.

10.)

Tethr Tethr is a cloud-based conversation intelligence platform that combines AI, machine learning and over a decade of customer experience and sales best-practice research to surface contextual insights from phone calls, chats, emails and other customer interactions. Companies use Tethr to turn large amounts of unstructured voice of customer conversation data into insights they can deploy to improve their customer experience.

11.)

Trillys Systems ActuCall Imagine for a moment that you are a call center manager responsible for generating revenue through signing new customers or up-selling to existing ones. Imagine that your KPI is telling you you have an abandonment rate of 5% and someone comes along and says "No, your abandonment rate or dropped call rate is 13%." .." How do I know? AcutuCall VoIP software application can show you the dropped call data including, originating number and whether it was a network or equipment failure." Now imagine you can see your calls in progress on a mobile app, take your dashboard where ever you go! "What is a lost call worth to you?"

12.)

VOIPFUTURE GmbH. Voipfuture Qrystal Qrystal provides communication service providers, wholesalers, enterprises, call centers and cloud-based voice providers with unique, dual visibility monitoring capabilities for analysing both SIP and RTP packets. Unlike other solutions, Qrystal provides visibility into both control and media plane. This way, you get the full picture of in-call user experience, all in one place. Voipfuture’s patented technology automatically identifies typical impairment patterns, allowing you to reduce the time it takes to fix problems.

13.)

Xdroid Xdroid is an independent, privately-owned software development company. This enables us to respond to changes quickly. Our Artificial Intelligence solution, based on deep expertise, reveals the truth about your customer interactions and will help you to communicate better. Analytics knowledge is the backbone of our development team. Years of experience in developing high-tech software for contact centers of financial institutions, utility companies, telecom operators, etc., give us an incredible edge. We help you to predict and anticipate in an uncertain and turbulent environment. Communicate better.

 

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