Good news! Anyone can become a successful customer contact employee. Whether you do it as a part-time job alongside your law studies or as a full-time job, everyone has it within them to be successful in the customer contact field.
This logically doesn't mean you're automatically a pro at this, but with the right motivation, values, and skills, you can go far. As an HR professional, according to Sanne van Es (HR Manager at ContactCare), it's crucial to find team members who fit your company culture and are motivated to contribute to your product or service. Where do you recruit and what competencies are important in finding successful customer contact employees? Sanne van Es shares her experiences with you.
Find the right ‘cultural fit’
Recruiting new staff starts with identifying the values of your organization. What do you stand for? What are your key core values? What do you want to communicate? Who are you?
This creates a clear and inspiring picture of your organization's culture that applicants can align with. When the interview eventually takes place, it's important to not only look at the person's qualities but to see if there's a match between the applicant and the organization. Does this person fit with what we do and want to convey as a company? It's beneficial for both the organization and your potential new colleague to have a ‘good feeling’ about each other. This good feeling is achieved when someone shares your values. Someone with a good feeling has a healthy portion of empathy, the will and ability to adapt to others, and shares your values.
A key question is, of course, how do you find this out during an interview? As an organization, make it clear what your core values are and ask how the applicant experiences and applies these values. You can also ask how these are applied and lived.
Example
ContactCare has as a key core value ‘Develop yourself every day’. We believe it's crucial for our staff and ourselves to improve a little every day. For this reason, we find it extra important that an applicant can tell us what they still want to develop in, both professionally and personally. Building on this, ask: what do you do to achieve your self-development goals? This encourages the applicant to think about their development path and shows how truly motivated they are.
Motivated Employees
To master certain skills, you need motivation & discipline, says Chris Murphy, Trainer at the ContactCare Academy. It's of course very beneficial if you find employees with the necessary experience. However, even those doing this job as a part-time position can excel. Because anyone can become a successful customer contact employee. With motivation and perseverance, you can learn most competencies. Does your applicant not tick all the boxes of competencies yet but is motivated to learn, practice, and experience? Then there's a good chance you've found a successful employee.
That's why ContactCare started its own Academy in October 2019. In our Road to Customer Expert, our employees learn all the competencies they need as customer contact staff. Within a year, participants can grow as rough diamonds into highly experienced customer contact employees with a complete set of competencies.
The competencies of a customer contact employee
Competencies can be partially learned. However, basic skills must be reasonably present to truly excel in the role of customer contact employees.
The following basic competencies are important:
Show empathy
Have strong listening abilities
Build connections with customers and contacts
Be able to adapt quickly
Be service-oriented
Appearing empathic is slightly different from being truly empathic. As seen in our skill pyramid, the highest achievement of a customer contact employee is to create genuine connections. Everything learned, both functional and emotional, comes together in this ultimate goal.
When we align our skill pyramid against the needs of the customer, we see several parallels. Here too, the ultimate achievement is finding an emotional connection. Additionally, the bottom three layers are directly recognizable in the basic competencies of our employees.
With the foundation of these competencies, a customer contact employee can continue to grow and develop into an expert in customer interaction.
“Customer service is a profession where expertise makes a difference.”
Jorik | Customer Expert
One of our success stories is Jorik, a colleague who makes a difference and really helps people forward. With his background in the hospitality industry, he lives & breathes hospitality. For years he worked in the world of Michelin-star restaurants, where perseverance is valued highly to reach the top. Discipline, endurance, passion, and motivation are essential in this profession and he applies that mindset to all the work he does. Besides his work at ContactCare, he has his own record label and event collective.
Jorik is always eager to learn, which is very handy in his role as a customer expert. Not only does he believe speaking to customers correctly forms part of the learning process, but he also learns a lot from business operations within ContactCare. That's why ContactCare involves as much of its staff as possible in decision-making and future planning. Due to this strong involvement within the business operations, Jorik feels right at home on the work floor and goes the extra mile to keep our customers satisfied. Customer service is a profession where expertise makes a difference.
