Tips for Recruiting and Retaining Contact Centre Staff

Call Centre Associates has come up with 10 Top Tips to recruit and retain the right calibre of people in contact centres and hopes these can go some way to making a positive difference to contact centresí recruitment strategies. As Ian Lasplace, one of the founding directors of Call Centre Associates, explains, ìDespite a mix of varying strategies to try to counter it, high staff turnover continues to be a major issue for contact centres and hasnít shown much improvement since contact centres first appeared some 15 years ago. Clearly many organisations need to radically rethink their recruitment policies.î

Based on proven techniques developed over seven successful yearsí of placing middle and senior management and all levels of resource planning professionals in contact centres, Call Centre Associates believes this experience and expertise makes it well qualified to comment on such an important issue.

10 Top Tips

* Recruit against your organisationís corporate values and culture ñ your staff need to personify your business.

* Identify the personalities and traits of the successful people working within your organisation. Try to target and attain some of these characteristics when recruiting new staff.

* Understand the various disciplines within your organisation and recruit accordingly. For instance, different skills and experiences will be required for sales activities than will be for debt collection activities.

* Consider the culture of a department. Is it fast and pacy, with lots of technology underpinning it? How important is humour, communication skills and customer empathy as opposed to a more process driven, structured working environment?

* Who will your employees interface with and in what way? Ensure your recruitment planning considers the interaction with others in the business, and crucially, your customers.

* Aim to become the employer of choice within your staff catchment area. Understand therefore the competition in your location ñ what are they paying, what attracts staff, can you improve this?

* Provide meaningful staff development programmes and initiatives that are ongoing and recognise and reward talent where appropriate. Do whatever you can to keep and develop your staff. Losing experienced staff not only creates another recruitment vacancy, it also means that you have lost business, customer and process knowledge that will need to be retrained at time and cost to the organisation.

* Create a culture of internal excellence and keep people driven, motivated and wishing to excel. Reward and incentivise regularly and provide a fulfilling yet competitive working environment.

* Team building, whilst potentially seen as glib by some, serves a very real, positive purpose in the call centre environment. To work well and meet the needs of your customers, you need a harmonious and supportive work force able to relate to each other.

Ian concludes, ìThe ultimate objective is to get it right first time, most of the time. By investing time in the early stages of the recruitment process and having a carefully constructed retention process in place, then as an industry we should be able to start seeing a positive difference to current attrition levels.î