Most people don’t have what it takes to be customer service representatives. It takes special skills and personality traits to successfully interact with customers on a daily basis. And considering these CSRs are often the first point of contact between your company and your customers, it’s important that your customer service representatives do their jobs well. They need to be able to listen empathetically, problem solve effectively, speak professionally, answer questions thoughtfully, and have endless patience with a wide variety of different customers. They also likely need to have computer and data entry skills, be organized, and be pleasant.
If you’re looking to hire customer service representatives, consider using the temp-to-perm employment model.
What Is the Temp-to-Perm Employment Model?
The hiring process is fraught with risks. Unless you have a flawless recruitment and hiring process and years of hiring expertise and experience, you will likely end up making some hiring mistakes that will cost you in wasted time and money.
The temp-to-perm employment model reduces some of these common risks. It allows you to hire customer service representatives on a temporary basis for a pre-determined amount of time before you decide whether or not you will extend an offer of permanent employment.
Test Skills in Action
A large portion of applicants will lie on their resumes, or at least exaggerate, in order to impress hiring managers and have a better chance of being hired. Unfortunately, if you don’t spot these lies before hiring, you could end up with new hires who don’t have the right skills or experience to do the job efficiently like they said they could. You won’t hire the best employees for the job.
With temp-to-perm employment, you can test your new customer service representatives in action. You can see how they handle irate customers, how they respond to common questions, and how they generally treat customers on the phone, via email, and in person.
If they don’t have what it takes, you can get rid of them without any lengthy termination paperwork.
Assess Cultural Fit
Cultural fit is a huge indicator of success. Even if your new customer service representatives have the skills and experience you were looking for, they might still not work out because they don’t fit in with your culture, your environment, and your existing team. They might not hold the same values and beliefs as your company holds. They might not believe in the work you do. They might not collaborate well with their team members or managers.
The temp-to-perm hiring model gives you the time you need to assess cultural fit to see if the new candidates is truly the right fit for your company, for your team, and for the job at hand.
Reduce Your Costs
When you hire permanent customer service representatives that don’t work out, you might have to pay severance to terminate them. You might also have to pay for additional training time. And you might waste money from reduced productivity. Then, you’ll have to pay for the costs of recruiting and hiring new CSRs to fill the now empty positions.
These costs can be significantly reduced or eliminated with the temp-to-perm employment model. By ensuring that someone is right for the job before hiring him on permanently, you can improve your retention rate and lower your turnover rate, which will save you money.
Let the Employee Assess Your Company in Return
The temp-to-perm model also benefits your new employees. They will have a few weeks or months to test out the new position at your company before committing to work there permanently. If they decide they don’t like spending all day on the phone, can’t handle being yelled at by disgruntled customers, or don’t enjoy the work, they can leave before making a commitment, instead of staying at the job, being unproductive, unhappy, and unfulfilled.
