Call Center and CRM Best Practices

The process of hiring customer service professionals, whether in the commercial contact center, retail store or bank branch, often includes a telephone interview early in the recruiting and hiring process. This manual process frequently means that recruiters spend significant time and multiple contact attempts to schedule and conduct these phone interviews. This unnecessarily elongates the hiring cycle and often overlooks well-qualified candidates who might not be available during a recruiter’s normal working hours. A novel alternative to manual, recruiter-led telephone interview using media-rich web and voice technologies can greatly streamline this process and provide additional benefits to the key stakeholders in the hiring process.

Saddletree Research has a long history of conducting objective analysis of key trends in the customer service industry. Their research consistently identifies the recruiting and interviewing process as a prime example of a process that is inefficient, rife with inconsistencies that could benefit from the application of technology. They believe this process could be dramatically improved by the use of virtual interviewing technology. Virtual interviewing has the potential to dramatically improve the customer service hiring process, reduce the turnover that continues to plague the industry, improve sales and service performance and reduce the costs of recruiting and hiring customer service positions. 

The white paper Improving Hiring Performance - The Business Case for Virtual Interviewing  introduces the characteristics of virtual interviewing, how it can improve the hiring process, and the measurable benefits that can be realized from it.