A great and highly productive customer service team is among the few backbones of a successful business. This is because customer service plays a critical role in representing the brand and interacting with potential clients, both of which boost sales.

However, many businesses find it challenging to put together a great customer service team. For these businesses, the problem begins with recruiting employees who offer quality customer service. 

To help you create a high-quality customer service team, you first need to recruit the right employees. Below, we will look at six ways to improve your customer service recruitment strategy.

Is Customer Service Important?

Have you ever bought a product online and encountered usage or quality problems? In that situation, the first thing you probably did was contact the company’s customer service.

In business, customer service is one of the most underrated yet vital parts of an organization. They are more than just people that answer calls or emails about customer concerns and feedback. In business, customer service is the direct connection between the company and the customers.

The importance of any customer service team is to offer unbeatable customer service through customer relations. A customer service agent is involved in roles such as persuading customers to try out products or services in the company, resolving complaints, and answering questions. 

Customer service agents use their persuasive, verbal, communication, and empathetic skills to cultivate a community of loyal customers. They keep customers happy with the brand, which in turn, helps the company grow. After all, happy customers are the foundation of a thriving business.

So, the short answer is yes. Yes, customer service is important to the growth of a brand and company.

Importance Of Customer Service In Business

Investing in customer service acts as grease for a fully optimized business. It positively impacts customer perspective about your business while convincing clients to interact positively with your brand. More importantly, great customer service complements a business’s marketing effort.

Customer service agents may be known for answering client questions and solving their problems. However, the benefits of efficient customer agents are deeply rooted in the business as they can help that business save and make money.

Some of the importance of customer service in business include:

1. Customer Retention

The argument of customer acquisition vs. customer retention is a constant hot topic in business. Organizations are usually concerned about how they can increase their outreach and attract new customers. However, research has shown that customer retention is a much better option than customer acquisition. 

Although attracting and acquiring new customers is a great way to increase your customer base, several studies show that customer acquisition is more expensive than customer retention. This is due to the time and expenses that go into building brand loyalty, marketing, advertising, campaign targeting, and other miscellaneous factors, such as the time taken for the customer to trust you.

Additionally, statistics show that increasing customer retention by 5% can cause a company’s profit to grow between 25% to 95% over a period. This feat can be achieved if a company pays more attention to efforts that involve retaining clients and building loyalty. One of these many efforts includes investing in customer service.

Providing quality customer service reduces customer churn rate. It makes clients feel more attached to your brand, building a form of loyalty that makes it more challenging for them to stop transacting with your organization. After all, clients are less likely to leave if they feel satisfied, valued, and listened to.

Essentially, investing in recruiting customer service is a small price to pay for building a network of committed clients.

2. Customers Are Willing To Pay More

According to Forbes, a survey carried out on 1000 U.S. customers, 58% of U.S. customers are willing to pay more to receive great customer service. This shows many clients value not only the quality of goods or services they purchase but also the quality of the customer service accompanying these purchases.

Customers value businesses that treat them well, and companies directly profit from investing time and effort into providing superior customer service. In an era where businesses are growing highly competitive, quality customer service is a vital ingredient in making the most of a business-client relationship. Providing unbeatable customer service encourages clients to stick to your brand and forego transactions with competitors.

3. Increases Customer Lifetime Value

If you purchase a product from a vendor who offers superb customer service, you are bound to return there for future purchases. The more you purchase, the more money the business makes from you. This is the concept of customer lifetime value or CLV.

CLV is a metric measuring the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer. This amount depends on factors such as the value of an average sale, the duration of the business relationship, and the frequency of purchases. 

Great customer service grows customer lifetime value. When customers have excellent experiences with your business’s customer service, they are more likely to return for purchases and ignore all competitive offers. 

4. Attracts Clients

When customers enjoy good experiences with your customer service, they will be more inclined to share these positive stories with friends and family. By doing this, they inadvertently advertise your brand and spread the word about your business. This gets more potential clients interested in your products or services and is easily the cheapest and most effective type of advertisement.

5. Supports Marketing Efforts

There are no limits to the potential that great customer service unlocks. Proactive service can unlock and offer important insights into customer experiences. It creates marketing opportunities. It offers an easy way to personalize customer service and improve your online conversion rate. It positively impacts brand image and makes it look more attractive to customers. 

The possibilities are endless with stellar customer service.

What Is A Customer Service Recruiting Strategy?

While the benefits of having a customer service team onboard cannot be underemphasized, creating an efficient team of customer service agents is fraught with problems. These problems are not so loosely based on several deciding factors, such as the skills the employees must have and their experience handling customers.

Some of the challenges employers or businesses face when hiring customer service agents include the following: 

• Attracting the right candidates
• Limited talent pool
• An unstructured recruitment process or strategy

• Correctly assessing the applicant’s skill
• Choosing a candidate with good experience or work history

• Efficiently tracking top applicants
• Speeding up the hiring process
• Using data-driving recurrent processes
• Establishing a strong employer brand
• Challenges with filling direct customer-facing job roles
• Low employee engagement rate after hire
• Limited training or inadequate onboarding 
• Limited training budget and time
• High turnover rate and low employee retention rate

Recruitment problems and other challenges after hiring a customer service agent often relate to the recruitment strategy. But what exactly is a customer service recruitment strategy?

A customer service recruitment strategy is used in recruiting a customer service agent. It describes the approaches used in selecting customer service professionals in a way that ensures only the best hiring decision is made. After all, the establishment’s success depends on several factors, including the quality of customer service.

A good customer service recruitment strategy should aim at well-qualified applicants, high candidate retention, high employee retention, and job satisfaction. 

Every business or recruiter has a unique customer service recruitment strategy for hiring employees. However, not every strategy is the best. A good customer service recruitment strategy should help companies identify factors such as the resources needed for the hiring process and the skills applicants must possess to be hired. It should also be able to identify the best steps for pinpointing top candidates.

A good customer service recruitment strategy should help the hiring team and employer determine how candidates should be screened, vetted, recruited, onboarded, and trained. This will not only help the recruiter choose the best applicant for the job role but also reduce recruiting costs and shorten the time between the hiring processes.

So, what happens if your current customer service recruitment strategy doesn’t do all these? The best thing to do will be to review the strategy to find out what the challenges are and how to make the strategy better.

Six Ways To Improve Your Customer Service Recruitment Strategy

The customer care employee hiring process is undoubtedly riddled with problems. However, to overcome this problem and introduce high-quality customer care agents to your staff, you must first improve your recruitment strategy. The better your recruitment strategy, the better hiring decisions you make.

Whether you are building and managing a remote workforce of customer service agents or recruiting on-site customer service agents, you need to have a solid customer service recruitment strategy. Six ways you can improve your customer service recruitment strategy include:

1. Offer Important Information Upfront

Communication may be key during a recruitment process, but transparency is more important. From the very first stage of the hiring process, it is vital to ensure you and the applicant are both on the same page.

Many employers make the mistake of hoarding important information in the hopes that this information will be communicated in the final stages of the application process. However, this is like shooting oneself in the foot, as this strategy often backfires.

In every stage of the recruitment process, let your customer service candidates know all important information, including salary, benefits, perks, expected shifts, and even training offered. More importantly, let all candidates know what you are looking for in a customer service employee. This will help them understand their potential obligations and your expectations of them.

You will also need to ask them to be upfront about their expectations. Encourage questions, as this will ensure the creation of transparent conversations. Doing these will make it easier to identify and focus on candidates that you think will be the best fit for your business and customers.

2. Communicate Growth Opportunities 

One study showed that nearly one-third of employees quit their jobs because they feared a lack of career advancement or professional opportunities. In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons for the high turnover rate in customer service jobs.

Candidates who take on the role of customer care agents often do not see the potential for growth in their careers. They see their job as a dead-end, a feeling that often results in low employee engagement and quitting. 

Employers or recruiters can fix this problem by informing candidates about the business’s growth opportunities. This will make it easier to attract top talents and retain them during and after the recruitment process.

Let candidates know the kinds of specialized training and growth opportunities that your organization offers. This is important because customer service applicants, like any other employee in any role, crave growth. 

Don’t just sell them a dream. Offer proof or evidence of these growth opportunities. Make them see that the customer care role they are applying for may as well be the starting point or a stepping stone in their career or professional lives.

While doing this, ensure you ask each candidate what kind of training processes they will be interested in. 

3. Be Creative With Recruitment Channels

When businesses think about customer service recruitment channels, they immediately think about job boards or recruitment agencies. While these work, they are only a part of the many recruitment channels businesses have at their disposal.

To attract top talents that will elevate the quality of your business’s customer service, you need to make your offer stand out from the crowd of other listings out there. To do this, you need to look past generic recruitment channels.

Instead of focusing on job boards, incorporate unusual channels such as social media platforms. Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat may look like unusual places to advertise customer care job openings. However, with over 4.6 billion people using social media in 2021, your job listing will undoubtedly grab attention on these platforms.

More importantly, if recruiting workers independently has not been working for you, you can try choosing the best staffing company to connect you with good customer care candidates. 

At iCreatives, we are a staffing company dedicated to connecting you to talents with the skillsets you seek. Through a thorough recruiting process to ensure you get to work with the perfect fit for your business, we will connect you to talented contact or full-time customer service agents that want to work with you. 

Additionally, you can choose to get creative with your posting. Instead of the usually written job description, you can use videos to grab the attention of possible applicants.

4. Offer A Realistic Job Preview

What happens when the day-to-day job role you offer a candidate is not what they get when hired? The candidate will leave their job. This is what you get when you do not fully and transparently onboard a candidate, even before they get the job.

A realistic job preview offers a candidate a close-up of the roles expected from them. It is one of the many deciding factors that helps them know if they want to work with your business in that role or not.

Give candidates a clear idea of their job roles during the recruiting process by providing an interactive simulation of the vacant job role. This will provide insight into what is expected of the candidates.

Connect candidates with employees who are currently in that role. Create a custom interview, such as a live chat, to test how a candidate will attend to an angry client. This not only prepares the candidates but enables the recruiter to test the candidate’s skills.

5. Utilize Situational Judgement Tests

Using situational judgment tests as a way to improve customer service recruitment strategies further bolsters the importance of a job preview. Situational judgment tests give candidates a better idea of what it will be like to work as a customer service agent. In a way, it is a form of job preview.

You can create and use situational judgment tests by giving candidates scenarios they can respond to. Create problems customer service agents face and have candidates solve these problems. This will make it easier to evaluate the candidates, assess their skills, and make the best hiring choice.

6. Use Recruitment Data

Data makes it easier to make decisions in business. This makes it a great way to improve customer service hiring strategies.

Using recruitment data makes it easier to discover what skills and qualities are important when selecting customer service agents for your business. It also makes it easier to rate candidates based on how many of these qualities they possess.

Utilizing recruitment data as a strategy for hiring customer service agents offers a better way of analyzing the hiring process. Backed by data, you are more likely to make good choices.

Recruitment data also makes it easier to curate what the ideal customer service agent persona is. Employers can also measure candidates up to these personas to determine candidate performance. This also makes it easier to keep track of candidate performance throughout the recruiting process.

Improving Your Business By Improving Your Customer Service

The strength of your customer service team determines the success of your company. The best way to create a great customer service team (which offers excellent customer service) is to begin by hiring the right people.

To hire the right candidates, you need to have a solid recruitment strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re recruiting an hourly employee or a permanent one to fill the role of customer care agent; you can always choose the right candidates for your business.

Are you ready to improve your current hiring strategy? Use our guide to take your customer service recruitment strategy from zero to hero and build an effective team of efficient customer service agents.

---