Hiring a customer service representative? Need to know how and where to find the best candidates? Here is a comprehensive guide to finding the best customer service representatives. Read on!
What is a customer service representative? The customer service representative solves the queries of the customers. A customer calls in a company then that call goes to the customer service agent of that company who handles it.
The agent goes through the customer profile listen to their issue and solves them. Furthermore, customer service representatives are required in every industry like banking and consumer services.
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Some Basics on Hiring Customer Service Representative
The majority of the customer service agents answer the customer calls in the telephone call centers. Others interact and solve customer queries through live chatting mode. In every industry, there is a huge requirement to hire a well-qualified customer care agent.
Example: In the banking industry, people want to know how to open an account and other things then they can contact customer service.
On the other hand, freelance customer support staff working in retail stores helps the customers to find the items in their store. Some customer service representatives’ duties are to increase sales and making calls for the company’s marketing purpose.
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Market for Customer Service Representative
Becoming a customer service representative opens the door to many customer service opportunities. The career objective of a freelance customer service worker is to handle calls and answer customer queries.
It is a highly rewarding career in the USA and other countries of the world. According to the reputed recruiting website, the survey revealed that the customer service representative salary in the USA is $24,310.
The customer service manager earns an average salary of $39,694 annually in the United States. After gaining experience in this field, the salary structure on the above managerial posts is $84K annually in the USA.
A person planning to become a virtual customer service agent for a freelance customer service profile should have proper communication qualities to deal with their clients on call.
He or she should have problem-solving abilities while dealing with different people. It is a team job so the person should establish a strong connection with the team members so that it is easy to connect with the customer on the freelance customer service number.
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Things to note while hiring customer service representative
Is your company planning to hire customer service representatives for freelance customer representative jobs? Due to poor customer service in the USA, around 50% of companies have lost their business in the past years.
To give a better experience to the customer it is important to understand customer service too. 86% of customers stop using company products due to bad customer experience.
Companies are trying to build a strong communication channel with customers. As a recruiter from the company, you should keep these things in mind while hiring a customer service representative.
- Self Control in the person: A new employee in the company will find it difficult to deal with the clients. As an employer, you should choose a customer service representative who has self-control quality in him or her.
- Patience while handling customer calls: A virtual customer service representative needs to tolerate the different clients on calls. It is better for the company if the customer care agent can patiently handle the customer and team.
- Ability to Communicate: The customer service reps should be able to communicate with the customers in multiple languages.
- Product Knowledge: The Company is selling a product then the customer service rep should know about the product.
- Work Ethic: Online customer rep should be able to follow the work ethics of the company.
- Skills to instigate skills: The customers’ service representatives are always connected with customers to convert leads in sales.
- Commitment with company: To give high-profit turnover to the company, the customer service rep should be committed to their research work.
- Adaptable to change: The company needs a customer service representative who is highly adaptable to a quick change in the organization.
- Willingness to help others: The reps have the quality to help the customers on the call and deal with their issues.
- Able to understand customer’s feelings: Freelance customer support can deal with customer issues on call.
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Qualities of Best Customer Service Representative
You are hiring customer service staff for your company. Then, you should keep a list of qualities in mind to get suitable people for customer service profiles.
- Patience: It is one of the crucial things that a work from home customer service agent must have while working for a company. In some situations, the representative has to deal with frustrated and irritated customers on call. You are able to help the customer only when you will patiently hear their issues.
- Communication Ability: The ability to communicate is an important skill because miscommunication causes disappointment and frustration.
- Time management: The quality of a good customer service representative is the ability to manage time while working. He or she should be a multitasking person.
- Able to read customers: As an employer, you are going across things to search about how to be the best customer service representative. You should have the knowledge of the qualities that a customer service agent should have in him or her that can benefit your company. Among them is able to read customers mindset on call and clear their issues on time.
- Goal Oriented Mindset: The customer service agents without any proper goal planning are not able to get desired results for the company. Therefore, a person with proper goal oriented mindset turns out to be an asset for the organization.
- Capable to handle surprises: Sometimes, customers can throw curveballs on your team. The customer service representative should have the skills to handle the unexpected surprises.
- Persuasion Power: In your company, you have the team of people with persuasion skills then there are chances that they can convert leads into sales. Persuasion power is a skill through which the customer service staff can force the customers to buy the products.
- Determined towards job: Customer service representatives can bring a positive impact in the organization they are determined towards their work. They are following the work ethics beneficial for the company.
- Able to bring confirmed customer satisfaction: It is a big thing when the work from customer service agent is able to bring a confirmed satisfaction from customers’ side.
- Willingness to learn: It is the general quality in the list. On the other hand, it is among the most important qualities that an employer should look in the candidate while hiring customer service representative for the organization.
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Customer Service Representative Rate per Hour
Customer service representatives should handle multiple responsibilities at a time. They answer telephone calls and share the information with the customers over there. Some customer service agents make outbound calls to generate sales for the company.
The representatives should have basic computer knowledge along with an associate degree in any field to start their career. Moreover, the customer service executives work for the insurance, manufacturing, and banking sectors.
The job of customer care is not confined to a building and now the companies started hiring online customer care representatives. In the first year of the job, the virtual customer service agent gets a $12.71 rate per hour. The hourly rate of the work from home customer service representative increases with time.
According to a survey of the reputed recruiting website revealed that the people working in the customer services department receives $13-$20 rate per hour after gaining work experience of 5+ years. Customer service contractors are providing customer service recruitment to many companies.
Now, the organizations are focusing to provide maximum customer satisfaction. Therefore, they need qualified customer service agents who can handle their customer’s queries over phone calls. There is a huge scope in this career in the future. The companies give a performance bonus to the agents who perform well in handling customers for their company.
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Places to find best customer service representative
It is a huge responsibility to handle customer service representative hiring for the company. In this internet era, you can hire customer service representatives from many online job boards. You can post your requirement and can see the candidate’s list looking for job roles. These websites are the best to get suitable employees for the company.
- Glassdoor: Glassdoor is one of the largest places online to seek suitable employees for an organization. It acts as a bridge between the employer and the employee.
- Toptal: A popular place to find qualified customer service representatives is Toptal. Daily, thousands of people who are looking for jobs make their profile mentioning their skills and abilities on toptal.com.
- unremot.com: Candidates looking for a job post their resume and skills on unremot.com. Then, the employers who are hiring customer service reps or for any other job role can go through these profiles.
- Guru.com: It is an online marketplace on the internet where employers and employees can easily connect. On Guru.com, many reputed companies post their job requirements.
- Upwork: Upwork is a reputed and trustworthy marketplace online for the freelancer community. Jobs are posted on this website in multiple categories like content writing, web development, and customer service hiring.
- Fiverr: For freelancers, Fiverr is a suitable place to find the work from home customer service representative jobs online. People receive well-paid work from this online job board.
- Hired: The freelancers looking for gigs can make their complete profile on the website i.e. hired. The organization can go through these profiles and get suitable people.
- ZipRecruiter: A thriving marketplace on the internet founded in the year 2010. Small companies from the USA and UK post their job requirement on the ZipRecruiter website.
- Indeed: It is an American worldwide employment website launched in the year 2004. Companies hiring a customer service representative can get a premium job posting feature on this website.
- Linkedin: It is an employment-oriented website started in the year 2003. The Linkedin platform is useful for professional networking for employees and employers.
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Steps involved in hiring best customer service representative
You cannot get the best people for your company by just posting job applications and taking interviews with candidates. The employer needs to follow some tactics to hire people for customer service representatives or any other position in the organization. Here is the list of steps necessary to follow while hiring a customer service representative for the company.
- Clear about the job description posted on the websites: The job description should be clear and it should have the list of customer service representative skills that you want in your company’s employee.
- Reveal the job’s success criteria: Once the candidate is involving in the interview process. He or she has the right to know about the company’s goals. How leadership follows in the organization.
- Mention the core values of the company: What are your company values? Do your employees are aware of it or not? When you are, hiring employees do check-in them if they possess the qualities that you want.
- Only hire those people who believe in customer service philosophy: One thing that employers and employees must remember that customer service is not a department in any organization. A candidate coming for the customer service agent interview should understand about duties of customer service representatives towards customers.
- Assess behavioral style of candidates during the interview: Keeping track of how the candidate is answering customer service representative interview questions is not the only thing to find a suitable person. You have to assess the candidate’s behavioral style during the interview rounds.
- During the recruitment process, demonstrate your company’s work culture: You can reveal your company work culture during the recruitment process. At that time, mention the applicant as an employee to get feedback on the company’s policies and working style.
- Hire the personality that fits in the customer service profiles: The majority of us have heard this old expression “hire for attitude and train for skill.” Attitude is an individual applicant’s approach towards the job. Personality is about fitting in their particular company’s job.
- Ask about applicant’s plans: An interesting question you can ask the candidate about the particular during the interview session. It can go like this where you see yourself in the five-year time.
- Ask the candidate about his or her definition of customer service representative work: A powerful customer service representative interview question with many right answers. As an employer, you have to choose a suitable answer to know about the applicant’s understanding of customer service representative work.
- Get feedback from new employees hired in the company: Most of the time the organization forgets to get feedback from new employees about the interview process.
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Top 10 interview questions for customer service representative
Keeping this list of interview questions in mind you can do customer service hiring for your company.
1. What do mean by customer service?
Customer service is about offering services to customers. The duties of a customer service representative are to build a positive relationship with the customers. Additionally, the agent needs to make sure to satisfy the customer by answering queries on the phone call.
2. List of relevant qualifications required for the customer service agent.
By asking this question as an employer, you want to know about the academic qualifications of the applicant. The person who came for a virtual customer service representative job interview is suitable for it or not.
3. How does the day start of a customer service representative in a company?
Here are daily activities that a customer service agent does in a company are,
- Taking customer phone calls and solving their queries.
- Resolve the customer issues on time.
- Deal with the issues of mismanaged payments.
- Give relevant information to the customers on phone calls.
- Encourage customers to select the right things for themselves
- Differentiate between great and good customer service.
As a recruiter, you can sense how well the employee is aware of the customer service agent role. He or she is capable to handle all the things give great customer service while working in the company.
4. How can you resolve the issue when the customer points out your mistake while reading about a product or service?
This question will help the interviewer to assess the ability of the applicant to empathize with the customer. In this case, the customer service representative can apologize for the mistake.
5. How you will deal with the issue when your team member misbehaves with customers?
In this question, the applicant will share his or her experience. Then, he or she will come with the possible solutions to deal with the issues when a team member starts misbehaving with the customers on call.
6. How you will define customer satisfaction?
The working of every business depends on the service quality offered to the customers. Therefore, the owner and staff members should have a clear understanding of customer needs.
7. Share any experience about an irritating customer how you will tackle this situation.
It is common for every customer service agent to face an irritating customer on the call. The representative should remain calm while dealing with such situations.
8. How can use customer feedback to improve the business?
This question is asked in the interview round to assess how much the representative cares about the customers’ feedbacks received on call. The virtual customer service agents are using it for business improvement or not.
9. What is important for you to give friendly service to customers or product excellence?
Both are important because the excellent product will sell in the market. Fast services will help to increase the sales of the product.
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Top 10 tools to use while hiring customer service representative
Use these better-recruiting tools to save your time and money while hiring a customer service representative for your organization.
- Chatbots: It is a messaging application to perform simple programs using the AI automation system. A recruitment chatbot system is useful to see candidates’ information after working hours.
- Sourcehub: Sourcehub is a great place to find suitable employees for a company. The data of the potential applicants are available on the website with their contact information.
- Contact Out: It is a struggling job to connect with the employees online. Contact out is a place that makes it easy to get the email addresses of the people and connect with them in the recruitment process.
- Hiretual: For larger business houses, it is helpful to gather contact information while following the recruitment process steps. Instead of relying on the other social media messaging system, you can use Hiretual to directly connect with the employee and employer in the recruitment process.
- Textio: While writing the job advertisement for your company, you have to add the necessary information to it. Therefore, you can use an AI-based writing system i.e. Textio to prepare job advertisements easily.
- Know Your Worth: Many hiring managers have an awkward experience in discussing salary with potential candidates. Glassdoor.com uses a tool to know your worth from which you can find the salary structure of a particular job role like an online service representative.
- HireVue: To filter a large group of applications received for customer service profiles. Then, HireVue is the best tool to do this.
- Click Boarding: Once you hired an employee for your company. Then, you need to do the training and documentation work. Use the Click Boarding tool to make the documentation steps easier for employers and employees.
- Indeed: Through a recent survey on indeed.com revealed that around 100 million people looking for jobs have posted their resume on it. A reliable online recruitment portal 72% interview offers and 65% of them are from the USA.
- Zoom.ai: To improve the employer and employee experience during the recruitment process, Zoom.ai has launched many features of meeting scheduling and call transcribing.
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Dos and donts while hiring customer service representative
Here is the list of do’s and don’ts need to follow to hire customer service for the company.
Dos while hiring customer service representative,
- Prepare a suitable job advertisement to hire an online customer service representative. Use AI-based writing tools like textio to write an accurate job advertisement.
- As an employer, you have to remain transparent regarding job roles. In the interview process, share all the details with the applicants.
- In the hiring process, keep in mind the technical and non-technical team aspects. You are aware of what your company employees want from the new employee. Then, it is easy for you to do the hiring.
- Encourage existing employees to adapt to the changing environment in the company. Then, only you can ask the new employees to follow it.
To hire customer service for your company keep this list of don’ts in your mind,
- Don’t start recruiting new employees for your company without any proper planning in your mind.
- It is impossible to find a perfectionist customer service representative for your company. You will follow such unrealistic things then you might lose a valuable employee.
- Unrealistic approaches used in recruiting customer service staff will waste the time and resources of the company. You will not get suitable employees for the job role.
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What are 3 important qualities of customer service?
You want to hire a customer service representative for your company. Check these customer service representative skills in the person. It includes the patience level of the person, problem-solving abilities, and adaptability to work in a changing environment. Customer service representative plays a big role in the company. Many customers approach the representative for their issues with the products of that particular company.
What should I look for when hiring a customer service representative?
The person responsible as a recruiter for customer service jobs should look into a list of things while hiring customer service representatives. An online customer service representative can patiently deal with the customers on call. He or she should be capable of handling people and solving their issues on time.
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