Thought Leadership Series: Hiring, Leading and Teamwork in the Support Center

This article is the first in a three-part series that examines the key steps to successfully hiring, leading and motivating your team of support professionals.

Hiring For Great Service: How to Screen, Attract and Retain Top Support Talent
In a fast-paced customer contact environment, the people you hire have a critical impact on morale, turnover, and performance and the skills people need to be successful support agents are not always evident from a resume. This article will explore how to build a sustainable process for hiring the very best people for your support team, by combining good recruiting practices with the unique needs of a customer support operation.

Screening Candidates
Try an experiment. Look at the resumes of the very best people who are currently on your support team and then look at the rest. If you do this, you will probably make an important discovery: there is probably only a loose correlation between real talents and resume credentials. This does not mean that resumes dont matter they do. First, they help you screen people for ticket-of-entry skills. If someone has to have specific networking certifications, for example, or a minimum level of experience in your field, these resumes give you a quick go/no go decision regarding which candidates to look at further. More subtly, they can often tell you how successful or unsuccessful a candidate has been in the past. Winning awards in most of their past jobs tells you something, as does a long string of six-month job tenures.

Drilling Down
OK, now you have taken a large pile of resumes and sorted them into a smaller pile. Now what? Now, start shifting your focus from pedigree to aptitude. Think about the core skills that make people successful on your team, such as problem-solving ability, interpersonal skills, leadership, or intuition. Then look to see how the experiences of these candidates might fit that profile. For example, someone who has already succeeded in technical support clearly deserves a look but so might people from other high-contact professions that require people to think on their feet, ranging from waitstaff to sales to financial services. At this stage, experience often counts for much more than book learning, so dont automatically pass over the guy from State Tech versus the gal from the Ivy League. And start looking for intangibles, such as progressively increasing levels of responsibility, presentation skills, or a clear career interest in support. Then you can start building a shortlist of people to initiate contact with.

Leadership Series: Hiring For Great Service - How to Screen, Attract & Retain Top Talent

The First Contact

How do most support agents interact with your customers? Remotely. Which makes simple phone screening great way to get a quick overview of candidates, as customers would experience them. You have three goals in doing a phone screen. First is exchanging information: you can probe a candidates experience, attitude, and war stories in a setting that is often much more comfortable than a formal interview. Second is building a case for the gut test chances are that you will often know if a candidate is worth pursuing further or not, right there in the first few minutes of the interview. Finally, based on how things are proceeding, you have an opportunity to sell yourself as an employer.

Building a Team Interview Process

Many support centers let managers do all of the interviewing and hiring for new team members. I would strongly urge you to think beyond this approach, for a number of reasons: First, your boss radar is likely to be very different from someone elses peer radar. When someone has to work alongside a new employee every day, they will generally have a keen eye for things like peer relationships, team skills, and problem solving. Second, diversity is critically important in a support operation. Left to your own devices, you are at great risk of hiring people who are just like you when in reality, you serve many different personalities across a wide range of issues. Third, many hands make light work. When you assign different roles in the interview process to different team members, such as intake, aptitude, or customer skills testing, you make them important, while giving them a real say in who gets to join the club. Just be sure to coach everyone on how best to represent your culture for example, no "stress interviewing" and preferably have them meet the candidate in pairs or groups, so people can share impressions.

Trust, But Verify

This phrase, made famous during the Cold War by former US President Ronald Reagan, also applies to support hiring. There are frankly many people who can talk a good game of support, but fall flat when it comes to problem solving. Conversely, many people have intuitive technical skills that are not always obvious from speaking with them. Aptitude testing is one of the most critical ways to maximize your hit rate in making good support hires. Some companies test abstract problem-solving skills, such as Microsofts famous question of how many barbers are there in Chicago? Others guide people through live demos of their product or service, or a remote support session of someone else's screen, and see how well the candidate drives. Still others may use formal skills testing or assessment. Whatever you choose, you should emerge from the process with a quantitative as well as a qualitative feel for how successful your candidate will be on the job. 2
Leadership Series: Hiring For Great Service - How to Screen, Attract & Retain Top Talent

Summing It Up
Above all, good hiring is a process. When executed well, this process will lead you to hire people who want to do support, have the skills and competencies to do the job well, and buy in to the culture of your team. By using the same skills that make your team successful such as intuition, assessment, and connecting with people you can leverage your hiring and recruiting process as an engine for the growth and success of your team.

About the Author

Rich Gallagher is a communications skills expert and former customer support executive who heads the Point of Contact Group, a training and development firm based in Ithaca, NY. His book What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Excellent Customer Service (AMACOM, 2008) was a national #1 customer service bestseller and finalist for the 800-CEO-READ's 2008 Business Book of the Year, and his latest book How to Tell Anyone Anything (AMACOM, 2009) explores the mechanics of difficult workplace conversations. Visit Rich online at www.pointofcontactgroup.com.

About SupportIndustry.com
Supportindustry.com provides senior-level service and support professionals with direct access to information on customer support, including enterprise strategies, people issues, technology, trends and research. This data enables support professionals to benchmark and improve their customer support operation. Members are responsible for the help desk and customer support operation of their company. More information can be found at www.supportindustry.com.

About Citrix Online

Citrix Online provides secure, easy-to-use online solutions that enable people to work from anywhere with anyone. Whether using GoToAssist to support customers, GoToManage to monitor IT assets, GoToMeeting to hold online meetings, GoToMyPC to access and work on a remote Mac or PC, GoToWebinar to conduct larger web events or GoToTraining to train customers or employees, our customers more than 35,000 businesses and hundreds of thousands of individuals are increasing productivity, decreasing travel costs and improving sales, training and service on a global basis. A division of Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), the company is based in Santa Barbara, California. For more information, visit www.citrixonline.com or call +1 805 690 6400.

Leadership Series: Hiring For Great Service - How to Screen, Attract & Retain Top Talent