Top leaders prefer Interpersonal Competence over Past Experience

You could have had a conversation with a sales executive that left an unforgettable impression on you. It may have been his or her ability to tolerate your unfriendly tone and tenor after a long day at work, or how he or she connected with you on a personal level to grasp your cultural or social preferences and dislikes. Or maybe that agent understood the cash crunch that caused you to miss a payment. These crucial behavioural and social skills enable people to have more pleasant interactions and get the most out of every customer engagement. Interpersonal skills are another term for soft skills. Consider speaking with a call centre executive who has excellent communication skills but no empathy for you or your problem. I'd rather chat to a bot, but am I already doing so? (The irony was deliberate!)

There is also a significant business aspect to it. You don't want your personnel to only solve customer complaints; you want them to start confident, meaningful conversations that lead to more sales. Such discussions can also be the most effective way for you to raise product awareness. I believe we have proven why interpersonal skills are important in business and why this call centre skills test is required for your personnel.

Let us now go through what interpersonal skills are in general:

1. Confidence:

You've probably heard that no matter what you say, say it confidently.

While we don't recommend assigning personnel with little product knowledge but high confidence to approach your customers, you get the idea!

When dealing with customers, your personnel must have faith in their abilities and judgement, as well as a strong believe and conviction in their words and actions. This is also true for workplace interactions, as such behaviour rubs off and improves the team's performance, increasing its overall efficiency and effectiveness.

As a result, your call centre pre-employment testing must include assessing prospective recruits' confidence levels.

2. Patience

Not all consumers are well-informed; some are even ill-informed and believe what they know or say is nothing but the truth.?Others may lack telephone etiquette or demonstrate a stunning lack of understanding, but your personnel must be able to handle such circumstances flawlessly. They must be patient enough to deliver accurate information while also maintaining control of the conversation. Nobody has ever enjoyed a heated argument with someone!

3. Empathy:

Perhaps one of the most subtle yet crucial characteristics of a successful call centre professional is empathy, not only for customers but also for coworkers. Working at ungodly hours to service clients who may be irritated for a variety of reasons is not easy. Someone may have had a horrible cab ride and feels insulted or uncomfortable; another may have missed a vital connecting flight and is now stranded in a strange country, relying on your company's customer service. A subtle gesture of making others feel safe and comfortable, that you are there for them and will give a helping hand or do whatever it takes, is priceless. Such behaviour earns you life-long clientele who entrust you with their difficulties and serve as your organization's most ardent advocates.

The source of innovation is a strong feeling of empathy. The more we can use our abilities to address unarticulated or unmet needs, the more we will be able to innovate.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

We couldn't be more in agreement.

4. Adaptability:

Working in a call centre is a demanding job, and not everyone is cut out for it. It entails working long hours, being always on call, rotating shifts at unusual hours, and working with a multigenerational workforce (we are keeping the list short). They can even have to work on national holidays, festivals, and birthdays! Individuals with high levels of flexibility are required for such diverse and perhaps distinctive elements. Constantly changing consumer tastes may need learning new skills and the capacity to upskill relatively rapidly, which is why we believe flexibility is important.

5. Stress Management:

Imagine talking for two hours with your family and hearing them complain about what they didn't like about you the last time they visited you. Isn't that a bleak picture? Multiply it by four and maybe more, and you have a regular workday for a call centre employee. Furthermore, it necessitates maintaining a pleasant manner while chatting with customers and creating connection through cold calling. Conversion rates for such workouts are extremely low. Simply said, it is a high-stress work, and one cannot imagine a call centre representative who is incapable of managing stress. It is simply unavoidable.

6. Multiculturalism and Multiethnicity:

Times have changed. Offices are significantly more multicultural and racially varied than in the past. Increased intra-state, inter-state, and worldwide migration, fueled by globalisation (excuse me for harping on globalisation; it's an old subject, and I plead guilty), has created such a tendency. Your staff must treat their coworkers and customers with dignity and respect, value diversity and differences, and refrain from discriminating on any basis. This is essential for maintaining a dynamic and forward-thinking organisation and workplace.

7. Persuasion:

A successful sales agent is a master of both written and verbal persuasion. He or she knows how to change minds, establish positive perspectives, and overcome real or perceived barriers in order to convert business possibilities into real and tangible sales. Such a talent is also useful in supporting faster decision-making (we shall discuss decision-making in more depth shortly) in a collaborative setting, freeing up time to focus on execution rather than ideation. I hope I've persuaded you sufficiently!

8. Team Spirit:

In life, a group effort always outperforms individual genius. Great organisations are built by great teams, not great individuals. Don't believe me. You must hire people who have a strong sense of collaboration and the capacity to bring everyone along. Organizations create long-term plans, but in order for those plans to come true, every employee must be equally involved in them. Working together with a feeling of common purpose and vision is the only way to attain the desired results. A normal client call may also necessitate many touch points to soothe their fears. As a result, the ability to work well in a team is highly valued in a good centre employee.

Micheal Jordan, the Principal Owner of the Charlotte Hornets and probably the greatest basketball player of all time, believes the same way.

Teamwork and intelligence win championships, not talent. Micheal Jordan

(As a side note, MJ led the Chicago Bulls to six titles.)

9. Decision-Making:

A fast-paced work environment necessitates people with exceptional decision-making abilities. Whether to escalate the call to a supervisor or use hands-on skills to address the consumer's problem directly, which emails to respond to immediately and which can be addressed later- these are just a few of the many challenges that a call centre agent faces on a daily basis. Decision-making abilities are critical for ensuring smooth operation, and a call centre agent assessment test must analyse the prospect's decision-making abilities. Several firms provide a call centre situational judgement test for inbox prioritisation, which evaluates their comprehension and execution skills by prioritising the work at hand in the desired order.

10. Conflict Resolution Skills:

Let's face it, no matter how good your service and product are, problems arise in business. Nobody can please everyone! However, you can have personnel who can handle disagreements successfully and efficiently. A call handling test can give you the information you need about their ability to resolve issues and deliver solutions to clients. Even the most cohesive and well-oiled teams have challenges and disagreements within them. These are not derogatory terms! Individuals must have conflict resolution abilities in order to devise a mutually acceptable way forward for the team to work competently and collectively. We appreciate that the quantity of characteristics you must determine in order to properly evaluate interpersonal skills may be overwhelming. To locate the best-fit individuals, you don't have to be an evaluation expert. Companies like ours, as well as many others, provide specialist psychometric and personality tools to analyse candidates' personalities and also allow you to develop personalised evaluations on the aforementioned competencies. Not only that, but You can also create custom call centre pre-employment testing exams for extra talents you believe would help you locate the perfect candidate.

Metahire.ai is researching and working to design and deploy technologies that will help companies to find leaders, and high growing performance in the talent war.