Tips for recruiting and retaining your advisors

Your customer service is strategic to your company. Your advisors have a mission of the utmost importance. They are therefore expected to provide a quality response and to take care of your customers. Finally, their responsiveness must be irreproachable. Often confronted with the management of disputes, their role is decisive in guaranteeing the satisfaction of your customers. However, the current period of almost full employment exposes you to increased turnover, which weakens your business.

Here we propose 6 strategies to meet the challenges of recruitment in the field of Customer Relations.

Motivate your top performers

First, use alternative ways to motivate your best customer support staff. Secondly, seek their advice on organisational issues such as how to improve your efficiency, and then put their advice into practice. Give them the opportunity to have direct contact with top management. Avoid micro-management. Trust the best without burdening them with the hierarchy of your organisation.

Focus on company culture

Corporate culture can be defined as a set of values shared by all your employees. For example, it may include a sense of responsibility, authenticity, a taste for challenge and a results-oriented culture. When recruiting, it is essential to check whether your candidate embodies these values. We invite you to ask them to illustrate through concrete examples how they embody these values. Ignoring this personality trait in your future advisors will lead to a sharp increase in the turnover of your team. This has many repercussions. They are financial in terms of the time spent training a new employee. They are human, because of the negative impact that the wrong candidate will have on the rest of the team, with the risk of damaging the cohesion of the group. Above all, they are commercial, given the negative effects on your customers. One last piece of advice: if you have any doubts about a candidate, don’t hire them. As the saying goes, when there is a doubt, there is no doubt.

Meeting the expectations of the new generation

Today’s candidates have different expectations than they did ten or even five years ago. If you want to attract and retain the best customer service talent, you need to pay attention to their comfort level. Freeing them from dealing with frequent, low-value issues is essential. To do this, you are encouraged to set up a chatbot to handle the most recurrent conversations. But also to reduce the cost of customer service at the same time. With the arrival of the concept of Visio Sales, we advise you to identify profiles favourable to the use of Visio Sales. It is a new communication channel, efficient but more complex in terms of recruitment.

Use the data you have

At first sight, knowing your employees helps you to recruit better. Through annual appraisal interviews and professional training, you will capitalise on data about your advisers. As a result, you will understand the reasons for their performance. The analysis can be done on 3 axes: know-how, interpersonal skills and collaboration skills. Once this data has been collected, you can establish an evaluation grid to better recruit your future customer relations advisors.

Recruit all year round

It takes about 3 months from the publication of your vacancy to the completion of the recruitment. Then there is the notice period for your candidate. In these conditions, it is impossible to manage a recruitment in a hurry. Our advice is therefore to act continuously, all year round, in order to attract interesting profiles. It is possible to build up a CV library from which you can draw when the time comes. In addition to publishing advertisements, we invite you to communicate on company events in order to build your employer brand. In this way, you will attract unsolicited applications. Employee co-option is also a lever. A bonus can be set up to reward your employee. And friends of good employees are often good employees because they share the same values.

Invest in training

According to a LinkedIn survey, 94% of employees say they would stay longer with a company if it invested in their learning and development. In addition, many organisations are reluctant to offer continuous development opportunities because of the cost. If your advisers are commissioned on results, they will be receptive to training that will make them more effective advisers. Topics may include customer expectations to improve customer loyalty. But also on techniques for interacting effectively with customers and on the performance indicators to be taken into account. The first of these will be the conversion rate. For advisers in charge of Click to Chat, training should be provided to improve their turn of phrase. For those responsible for receiving Web call back, priority should be given to telephone sales training.