How 5CA hires quality work from home agents

Companies across the world are racing to get their team all working from home to protect them. During multiple global lockdowns, citizens are expected to practice social distancing, therefore it is essential for companies to operate with as many people as possible working from home.

5CA has been managing work from home customer service for over 15 years – you could say we were the original pioneer of Work-From-Home. In this webinar, we are going to offer some of our experience in how to ensure you deliver quality service using a remote working business model. It’s easy to watch quality suffer, especially if you are rushing into work from home because of the crisis. Join me with our Lead QA Analyst, Sylvia Mattl, and Derek Corcoran, CEO of Scorebuddy – registration details are at the end of this article.

I’m the Chief Customer Officer at 5CA so it’s my role to think carefully about how to constantly improve what we deliver to our clients. I’d like to share some ideas in this article about how educational levels of WFH agents help to improve service quality.

There are two important differences in our approach, compared to the way that a human resources team would typically process applications to a regular contact center. First, our team all works remotely. At 5CA over 95% of the entire company works from home. This means that when we are selecting agents to hire, we can choose the best, not just those who live near to the contact center.

We cherry-pick from our job applicants and only ever hire around 1 in 30 of those who apply. Our applicants don’t just need to have great educational qualifications, they also need to pass through a series of online tests that help us to determine if they have the right skills to help customers. There are many smart people who are just not cut out to help customers every day.

Because we can search globally, we can seek out agents using any language, with any skill, and anywhere. There are potentially over a billion people available to work from home globally so we can raise the bar on who we accept into the team.

But what really sets us apart is the second difference in our approach to hiring. We believe domain knowledge and educational qualifications are equally important. It is the combination that counts.

It’s also the combination of affinity with a product/service, with strong customer service skills and language. This combination is almost impossible to come by when sourcing within a 75-mile radius around a traditional multilingual contact center, but at 5CA we can find them as we have the global talent pool to source from. But a gamer without the right customer service skills will certainly not work…

Expertise in customer service and educational qualifications are thrown into the selection criteria but also a heavy focus on domain knowledge that sets us apart.

The educational level is a big plus. We can find people who are smarter and think out of the box, which drives up the quality even more. Quality at the end of the day is what truly counts in the service.

Our ability to search globally really improves the quality of the people we hire. I don’t think there is any other customer service specialist taking this approach.

We will talk about all these areas, and more, in our webinar Pioneering Contact Center Quality Working Remotely on April 22nd between 17:30 – 18:30 CEST. This webinar is a collaboration between 5CA and Scorebuddy.

Register here: https://bit.ly/3btCxkw

Photo by Judy van der Velden licensed under Creative Commons.