As a business, it’s worth thinking about what you do beyond just selling your customers an amazing product. Taking a granular look at things, you notice that it’s your agents who talk to them day in and day out and build a reputation for your brand. When agents are capable of creating such an impact on your business’ image, ensuring that the right people are on the job is time well spent.
Some companies do lean towards quantity over quality, especially if they receive tons of huge issues and don’t have enough resources at hand to tackle them. But for a brand looking to build a great work environment and a customer-friendly image, hiring right is the first and most important step.
Let me give you an example. You’ve heard of Nordstrom, right? It’s hard to miss the luxury fashion brand, with an exemplary service record and a plethora of customer service success stories all over the internet. But what exactly made them so successful?
When new service employees are hired at Nordstrom, they’re given a thorough introduction to the business culture and what it’s about. Unlike most companies, Nordstrom skips the extensive training manuals and focuses on just one rule for agents to follow at all times: rely on your judgement.
It might seem crazy that a business as successful as Nordstrom would have reps working completely without rules. But it’s quite the opposite — this one rule is so important that it’s the only rule they needed to mention.
Nordstrom has that rule in place only because they have confidence in their employees’ acumen. That’s not by chance; it took years of meticulous and careful hiring to be able to have that kind of confidence.
Hiring the right candidates is a strenuous process. Narrowing down a huge mountain of applications to the best of the best takes rigorous effort. When you’re investing a ton of effort in a process, how do you decide whether it’s worthwhile?
Let’s look at a few of the signs that the agents you’ve hired are top-notch.
They’re passionately productive:
The biggest, most obvious sign of successful recruitment is high productivity. Your investment of time and effort pays off in getting you a passionate team of representatives who are focused on their goals and their customers. A surge in productivity, happier customers, and repeat sales are all indicators that you’ve gotten your hiring right.
They do a great job of building your brand reputation:
In most cases, the only point of contact a customer has with a brand after purchase is customer support. So when a customer can talk about their issues to an effective agent every time, they’ll walk away happy every time. And nothing boosts a brand’s reputation like good word of mouth from a satisfied customer. You know you’ve hired well when your agents are dedicated to ensuring that customers have had a good experience, not just resolving tickets.
They take responsibility for nurturing a positive culture in the company:
This is especially important for any business that’s just beginning to spread its wings. The effort you put into meticulously choosing the best agents will shape the way your business grows, and the first people you hire will set a precedent for everyone who joins you later. Getting the right people early on will create a positive environment that encourages learning and development — which will attract brighter talent to join you as you grow.
Products don’t sell or use themselves; it’s humans who do both.
In a world with millions of brand options, the ones that we remember fondly are the ones that showed us their human side — the companies that offered us an empathetic ear and a moment of connection with an agent who really wanted to help. Each time you hire right, you’re making more opportunities for those connections and adding a little more polish to your perfect brand image.