Include behavioral questions in your interview that help you decipher whether an employee would be a good fit and if they could have success in your contact center.
In a job interview process, you are trying to figure out if the applicant either (1) has the skills to do the job or (2) has the ability to learn how to do the job.
Your questions should both examine what exists on an applicant’s resume and then dig deeper into how an applicant might respond to specific situations they’ll encounter on the job.
Having insightful questions helps you look beyond the resume and discover an applicant’s work behavior and characteristics.
Luckily, you don’t need to recreate the wheel every time you interview a call center agent. Create a list of questions you want to ask in an interview. During the interview, you can ask follow-up questions according to your applicant’s answers.
Here are 20 interview question examples (with a few follow-up question examples) to help you start your interview question list:
Provide exercises or mini-assessments to see what soft and hard skills your applicant has. This doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out section of an interview. It can just be seeing how they handle different scenarios.
If you have good call flows documented that your current reps are using to handle calls, see if you can get approval to have these interviewees try them out.
It’s important to see whether this rep struggles with following directions/instructions. If a potential rep can’t follow your call flows, that might be a flag that they aren’t good at following instructions.
Going into interviews, it’s important to recognize the nature of your call center. You want to hire agents who have the skills to handle the different situations they’ll encounter at your company. This way, you set them up for success.
If your calls are quite technical, hire reps who have at least a foundational knowledge of the content or they demonstrate that they are fast learners.
If you get a lot of disgruntled customers, make sure you hire reps who are good at handling conflict and not taking things too personally.
🔍 Related: How to write your first call flow if your call center doesn't have documented procedures
If you do not have a physical office for the rep to be in, make sure they have a situation at home that will work.
What would their home office look like? Do they have a private room to work, or would they have constant traffic in the background?
If they are interviewing from their kitchen table and people are walking around in the background, that might be a flag that they don’t have a dedicated space to work from.
That could lead to problems later on if there’s a lot of noise or distractions keeping the rep from taking a call or giving your callers a good experience.
Most importantly, they need to have a private space where they can maintain compliance, especially when taking credit card information and accessing customers’ private information.
When I was in college, one of my professors told me that the purpose of school wasn’t to memorize a bunch of formulas or facts. It was to develop three important skills that will help me throughout my life:
1. Thinking skills: Critical thinking, analytical, and problem-solving
2. Oral and written communication skills
3. Collaboration skills
These skills are very difficult for your trainers to teach your reps. If you can determine whether candidates already possess these skills, that will clue you in on whether they will be a good fit for your call center.
Using the example questions above, you should be able to have interviewees share experiences that would indicate whether they have these qualities.
🔍 Related: 8 Tips to Reduce Your Call Center Turnover Rate
Every candidate will need training and polishing to be competent at your call center protocols and processes. The question is, do you have the right resources to help them out?
These resources could be anything from a learning management system (LMS) to a knowledge base or other continuous learning options.
You may have great resources to help reps learn the technical aspects of the products they will support, but if your systems are really complex and you don’t have resources to sufficiently teach reps the basics of navigating through those systems (e.g. they don’t know what an internet browser is or how to copy and paste), then that will be a problem.
That might mean you need to look for tech-savvy people who are comfortable with computers and applications, perhaps students right out of college. You may need to exclude several candidates.
Or you may have a smaller shop and you lack good resources for helping reps with their soft skills. You may need to identify reps that are already gifted at diffusing a situation or handling an angry customer.
Remember: You can’t fill in your new hires’ knowledge and skills gaps if you don’t have the resources (i.e. tools, technology, or trainers) that can help them. You can only make their weaknesses a strength if the applicant’s weakness is a strength of your company.
When you hire the right call center agents for your company, it makes it easier for everyone to succeed on the job. The goal is to hire the right people so that they can accurately perform the necessary tasks and your new hires want to stay with the company.
When you are onboarding new reps, having a knowledge base they can reference adds to the new agent’s success. A knowledge base is a cloud-based system that stores your company’s knowledge and resources in one place.
ScreenSteps is a knowledge base software that creates a one-stop shop for call centers to easily create interactive call flows, checklists, and other documents that help agents complete tasks while in the workflow.
With ScreenSteps, agents don’t even need to put callers on hold to find answers to their questions.
Think a knowledge base could help you support your call center agents? Learn everything you need to know about knowledge bases — including what they are and who needs them — in the article below.