Yesterday we discussed the impact on a hiring profile by adding sales to service interactions. You should also consider how your pre-employment selection process may need to change when you add sales tasks to service interactions.
How will we determine if candidates applying for a care or service representative job can sell while engaged in a complex service interaction? Let’s think about a service and sales representative during a customer interaction. This interaction might be in a contact center, retail store, or hotel.
The interaction might follow this pattern:
- Listen and understand the service issue.
- Resolve the service issue as best as possible.
- Manage, navigate, and enter data into the respective systems while handling tasks 1 and 2.
- Ask questions, probe for opportunities, and use that information during the discussing while doing task 1, 2, and 3.
- Persuade the customer to listen to the offer and then accept the offer while performing tasks 1, 2, 3, and 4.
When we break down each of these stages we can start to see the tasks associated with a service and sales role. This helps us begin to understand the hiring profile.
Exhibit: Evaluating Service and Sales Job Candidates
The chart above helps us understand that each stage in the customer interaction requires your employee to use different abilities, skills, and behaviors to successfully complete each stage of the interaction.
From a hiring perspective, this means you need to evaluate the candidate in a holistic manner. Just measuring behavior and motivation will ignore problem-solving ability. Just measuring problem-solving ability will ignore multi-tasking, computer skills, and their ability to drive for results. You should consider using multiple assessments during the pre-employment assessment phase in order to get a better job fit.
If you are only using a structured interview, consider adding other types of assessments that will improve your ability to measure abilities and skills that are difficult to measure during an interview. If you are using assessments, review them to make sure they accurately measure the different stages of the service and sales interactions. By aligning your pre-employment assessment process with the changes in the job, you will have more success hiring the right people for your new service and sales role.
