Understand and define the job families (call or contact types)
Are all contact center jobs the same? No. They are not. The third step to achieving great hiring results is to define and understand the job families. Unfortunately, this process is often overlooked by contact center hiring managers. For an organization seeking to improve new hire retention, the critical starting point is a job analysis for each major call type. The job analysis should define the abilities and behaviors that drive job success. By defining the job, the hiring organization lays the foundation for the recruiting and hiring process because the job criteria are linked to organizational success. Typically this process involves meeting with job family subject matter experts to have them describe the job tasks. From there, the job tasks can be summarized into competency groups.
The chart below highlights FurstPerson’s 4 Quadrant model. In a simple way, the hiring process should measure:
- Work Habits: What the candidate did do
- Work Ability: What the candidate can do
- Work Skills: What the candidate can do
- Work Attitudes: What the candidate will do / fit for your contact center.
Sample competencies are listed in each quadrant.
The next chart highlights the result of a worker oriented job analysis process for an insurance organization. Two job families (call types) exist for this organization – Customer Care and Sales.
The results of the job analysis demonstrate that key competencies are ranked differently on importance between the two job families. In this case, customer focus is highly ranked for customer care (#2) but not as important in sales (#9). The hiring process should align closely with the most important competencies for each job family in order to drive business outcomes.
In earlier postings about the Steps to Improve Contact Center Hiring Performance, we discussed:
- Step 1: Understand and define the desired business outcomes
- Step 2: Understand which performance metrics relate employee performance to achieving the desired business outcomes
In our next post , we will discuss Step 4, .
