The Importance of Soft Skills in Call Center Recruitment

Making prospective customers feel seen and heard is a highly underrated skill. Rather than giving potential hires scripts, you might consider assessing their soft skills and rapport building.

Soft skills in call center recruitment refer to “people skills” that allow people to communicate and engage effectively with others. Soft skills can be taught but are also traits that some individuals naturally have mastery over. Let's examine a few examples of these traits and how they can benefit your business.

Examples of Soft Skills That Build Brand Loyalty and Score Sales

Whether your call center is focused on sales or customer service, you'll want your call center agents to possess the following soft skills:

• Empathy

Really digging into someone's perspective allows them to feel heard and understood by your company. From the call center agents' perspective, this makes for smoother interactions, which, in the long term, can significantly improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

• Active Listening

Rather than regurgitating a script, it's essential that call center representatives are able to carefully listen and respond to objections or problems.

• Operational Resilience

Call centers are fast-paced, intense environments where agents can sink or swim. If an agent isn't meeting their targets, they should try a different approach, rather than allowing themselves to become overwhelmed. Resilience is a tough skill to assess, but is a trait found in the very best of candidates.

• Positive Language

Part of having a customer-first mindset is using positive language during tense or conflictual interactions. Rather than resorting to defensive language, the very best call center representatives will naturally structure their speech around positive language ("I understand how frustrating that must be", "I appreciate your patience", "Here's what we can do.." and so on) that pushes interactions towards favorable outcomes.

How to Assess Soft Skills During Call Center Recruitment

There are various customer service tests covering real-life scenarios that outline potential responses. You could deploy personality tests (such as the Enneagram Personality test) to see how their natural traits align with your company's objectives.

Of course, assessing these soft skills in practice requires patience and dedication. Some companies may lack the resources to hire in bulk while paying due diligence to soft skills. That's where HyperHired comes in.

HyperHired is an industry leader in call center recruitment. Our founders own and operate call centers of their own, and we’re 100% confident that founded sales reps who realized that there was a better way to recruit top-tier call center representatives. Consequently, we've developed a competitive model that has scored our clients results like:

• Helping Apex Media Solutions become one of the largest digital marketing call centers in the country.
• Preventing HQ Magazine from screening thousands of resumes to fill their phone sales team.
• Assisting GoVine Insurance (a health insurance call center selling ACA and Medicare) with a team of 105 sales reps ahead of Open Enrollment.

See our video client testimonials for more information.

How can we ensure that qualified candidates have the right soft skills for your call center? We perform a thorough and meticulous 1-on-1 screening with candidates where we can assess the quality of their soft skills and disqualify 80-90% of all applicants. To find out more about how our method could land your business highly skilled call center representatives, book your free call here.

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