How to find great customer service and call center staff!

Great customer service is something that can be hard to find now days. I do however believe there is a revival going on in this country brought on by the wonderful world of social media. Had it not been for sites likes Angie's List, Tripadvisor and even Facebook, where a person can in seconds share their experiences with anyone on the globe, companies may have let this slip. I am glad.

Now as a person who prefers to shop online, I do not really need customer service, unless there is a problem, so I expect if there is great service as I feel I save the company a lot of time and money just by taking care of my order myself, online and having it shipped.

If you have ever spent time at WalMart or Mcdonalds, you must likely have experienced anything but stellar customer service. I honestly do not know if its the pay, benefits, atmosphere, culture or what, but time and time again, you will not get good service. Go to a Starbucks or Panera and you will be warmly greeted, even forced into conversation with a real human being and they politely the worker will up-sell you on items. It has to be culture and training. As someone who worked at Mcdonald's as a teen, I recall they spend a lot of time training on products and procedures but not a lot on customer service. They should reconsider this policy. I often thought it was a good place to start, but now that my own teenage daughter is working there I think its a bad place to start. Why start off your career learning how NOT to give stellar service.

So what is great service and how do you give it? Well great service always starts with an attitude. If you do not like people or serving people, then you really should find another line of work. You are not going to be happy and you will give the company and products a bad name. When people are recruiting for call center and customer service associates, you really need to start with attitude. How do you know if a person really cares about helping people? Look at their resume, look at what they do with their spare time, find out if they volunteer or what activities they do on the weekends. A true service minded person will live it, you will find it with good questions. Second, seek a coachable person. If you get someone who has the heart but not the talent, you WIN. You can also train a good worker with a positive attitude.

Start with those two items and you will be in good shape. More to come...

Karen

Going Back to the Old Way of Find Qualified Candidates- Thank Goodness!

Recruiting is changing and I say, thank heavens! This annoying model of posting a job and hundreds of either unqualified or irrelevant candidates apply, they we spend days and days weeding though the system to find a few to interview is madness!

How about from the perspective of the applicant...they apply for a job with a poorly written job description that is pages long, go through a super long online process which totally duplicates the resume they spent 8 hours developing. Then, after all of that, a great candidate will never make to the recruiters desk because of a robotic application system did not like their key words. What a nightmare!

I prefer the old "circle of influence" model, where you find the best candidates thought your networks, word of mouth and relationship building models. It appears we have come full circle and maybe now we can get back to what really works. 

This article talks about this process and how it relates to our younger generation of workers. 

Read the article NOW!

Sometimes NO is the best answer- Happy Friday!

In the staffing industry many people have the wrong motives for what they are doing. I believe what we do changes lives, everyday and it inspires me to do my personal best for every client. On this Friday, I thought I would share a story of how sometimes in life a NO can be the best thing that ever happened! Happy Friday readers!

This a story worth sharing from LinkedIn: (post originally by Malik Jahangir, Assistant Accountant)

A jobless man applied for the position of 'office boy' at Microsoft.

The HR manager interviewed him, then gave him a test: clean the floor. The man passed the test with flying colors.

"You are hired," HR manager informed the applicant, "give me your e-mail address, and I'll send you the application for employment, as well as the date you should report for work.

The man replied " I don't have a computer, or an email!"

"I'm sorry," said the HR manager. "If you don't have an email, that means you do not exist. And we cannot hire persons who do not exist."

The man was very disappointed.

He didn't know what to do. He only had $10 with him. Once that is spent, he won't have any money to buy any food.

He went to the supermarket and bought a crate of tomatoes with his $10.

He went from door to door and sold the tomatoes in less than two hours. He doubled his money.

He repeated the operation three times, and returned home with $60. He realized that he can survive

this way. He started to go everyday earlier, and return late.

He doubled or tripled his money every day. Soon, he bought a cart, then a truck. In a very short time, he had his own fleet of delivery vehicles.

Five years later, the man became one of the biggest food retailers in the U. S. He started to plan his family's future, and decided to have a life insurance.

He called an insurance broker, and chose a protection plan.

At the end of the conversation, the broker asked him for his email address.

The man replied: ' I don't have an email.'

The broker was dumbfounded. "You don't have an email, and yet have succeeded in building an empire. Can you imagine what you could have been if you had an email?," he exclaimed.

The man thought for a while, and replied, "an office boy at Microsoft!"

If you just lost your Job or Just failed an Interview Don't worry be Optimistic..... Good days are on the way and something better is reserved for you. -Malik Jahangir

Great story hun?  Love life people- you only get one!

#klpotter2 #jobseekers #staffing