Hire Customer Service Agents with Potential: A New Immersive Assessment for Call Centres

Recruitment statistics for contact centres don’t paint a pretty picture. 

Call Centre Helper’s 2021 Research Paper highlights that 43.5% of contact centre professionals are experiencing damaging staff shortages, and Contact Babel, proprietor of the UK’s largest annual contact centre study, have shared in their 2021 report that 1 in 6 operations experience annual attrition over 30%. 

With tragic turnover rates, poor retention, and lack of candidate experience, it’s clear that the contact centre industry as a whole has been in need of radical changes for a while. 

This was the motivation behind Amberjack’s development of a new immersive digital assessment for Customer Service Excellence, helping to identify potential in your candidates and mitigate against industry challenges. 

What are the main recruitment challenges for contact centres? 

You are probably familiar with many of the issues facing contact centres at the moment. The figures are stark and the churn is constant. Yet, these seemingly insurmountable challenges aren’t impossible to conquer. 

Trends show a number of key challenges popping up time and time again for contact centres. Below, we have summarised these and highlight just how much of a problem they really are. 

• Turnover is perhaps the single biggest issue which has been facing contact centres for many years now. According to Centralus, call centres deal with a 26% turnover annually, 11% higher than the UK average. With every notice handed in, comes hiring, onboarding, and training costs for new employees. 
• Retention is inextricably linked with turnover – if you can’t convince employees to stay in the business, they inevitably take their skills elsewhere. Lack of retention among your staff can lead to loss of talent to your rivals, and the initiation of ‘doom cycles’ of attrition, whereby staff shortages cause stress and difficulties to remaining employees and encourage further resignations. 
• Screening is a critical issue for the recruitment of new contact centre talent. Especially when the number one reason for attrition is staff being the ‘wrong type of person for the job’, as reported by Contact Babel. Finding the ‘right’ people for the job should be a priority for recruiters; current practices make prioritizing this key issue unnecessarily difficult. 
• Unstructured recruitment processes are rife across the contact centre industry. Many centres operate by manually sifting through CVs and applications, with staff members conducting interviews and so removing them from their work. These inefficacies delay the recruitment process, and lead to further issues with low-quality hires and increased opportunity for bias. 
• Limited budgets and time is one of the biggest issues reported by contact centre professionals. According to Call Centre Helper’s research, 58.3% of these professionals say that budget is a barrier to running their ‘dream’ contact centre, with a further 25.9% citing lack of time and human resources. 
• Candidate Experience is a hot topic at the moment. As the ‘Great Resignation’ looms over businesses across industries, it is clear that candidates are in control. As much as 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of an application process because of length or complexity. The aforementioned lack of resources and unstructured processes lead to unengaged candidates who are all too happy to jump ship. 
• Inadequate onboarding is also an important issue for call centre recruiters. After likely spending significant time hiring a candidate, many organisations neglect pre-familiarisation steps to help candidates settle in. In fact, Contact Babel’s research study suggests that up to 79% of contact centres drop their new agents in the deep end on their first day. This rush to make candidates productive as soon as possible contributes to stress and burnout among new recruits, who are more likely to quit under the increased pressure. 

With a variety of problems facing them, and sector growth on the up, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of contact centre recruitment is at the top of the agenda. 

How can Amberjack’s Customer Service Excellence assessment actually help? 

Amberjack’s new digital assessment for Customer Service Excellence has been developed specifically with these issues in mind. 

The immersive psychometric test allows you to assess for high potential individuals in a quick and effective way so you can hire the right people the first time round, while providing your candidates with a realistic job preview. 

Built using Amberjack’s universal model for potential, and using situational judgement scenarios, the assessment measures key skills which indicate high potential and align with the most in-demand industry skills. 

All the research and design behind our innovative assessment helps you to address the main problems impacting your customer service recruitment process.  

The assessment helps you to address limited talent pools and skills shortages by scrapping experience-based hiring, and instead identifying candidates with potential to succeed. The immersive experience allows candidates to better understand the working environment and their role within the business, encouraging reduction of high turnover. Furthermore, with a streamlined process and improvement of efficiency, lack of time and resources can become a thing of the past. With 22.9% of contact centre professionals confessing that efficiency is set to be their top priority for 2022, focusing on these improvements can help contribute to the cause. 

Even in these continually uncertain circumstances, you can hire for a flexible working world and have confidence in your hires with the Customer Service Excellence assessment, which has been adapted for in-office and home-working environments. 

How do you get in touch with Amberjack team members about the assessment for Customer Service Excellence? 

You can ask us questions and find more information on the assessment for Customer Service Excellence by expressing your interest via the form on this page. Our team would be more than happy to help solve your queries and delve deeper into how the assessment can help your organisation specifically.