Turning Challenges Into Wins in Onboarding Customer Service Representatives

Posted in Talent & Onboarding

Your customer service team is like the frontline of your business – solving problems and, hopefully, keeping your customers happy day in and day out. It’s a challenging job that requires both emotional intelligence and increased use of technology such as AI-driven tools, CRMs, and analytics platforms. So how can you set your customer service reps up for success during their onboarding? 

In this blog we’ll dive into how to build an efficient onboarding process for customer service centers and suggested metrics to track onboarding success.

Let’s dive in!

Challenges in Onboarding Customer Service Teams 

The first step in creating a successful onboarding process is to review your current process and find opportunities for improvement. You can mine exit interviews, customer feedback, and employee feedback for information. You can also take this assessment to see how closely your current onboarding follows the 4 C model (connection, culture, compliance, and clarification).

From our experience, these are the most common challenges faced when onboarding customer service reps and teams:

Preventing Information Overload

Your customer service rep has to get up to speed quickly on internal systems, product knowledge, customer interaction protocols, and more. But dumping all of this information on them all at once can lead to cognitive fatigue and can actually slow down their time to productivity.

Standardizing Workflows Across Locations

Many businesses operate across different countries, time zones, and remote and in-office locations. This can make it challenging to ensure consistency in workflows and processes – which is essential in maintaining a high-quality customer experience. 

Adapting to High Turnover Rates

Customer service representatives often deal with high call volumes and demanding customers, leading to a much higher employee turnover rate compared to other industries. According to COPC, call centers typically see about 70% or more of their first-year attrition in the first 90 days. Check out this turnover cost calculator to see how much customer service turnover could be costing your business.

How to Build an Efficient Onboarding Process for Customer Service Centers

As mentioned, we suggest familiarizing yourself with the 4 C onboarding model and addressing any of the gaps in your current onboarding process. Check out Enboarder’s Connected Onboarding Blueprint as a helpful resource here.

When it comes to onboarding customer service reps in particular, here are some areas to focus on:

Map out the onboarding journey

Do you have a grasp on all the different touch points, learning modules, check-ins, and training resources that your new customer service team members will need? 

If not, it’s time to map out their onboarding journey so you understand the bigger picture. How and when are your new customer service reps connected to the information, people, and resources they need to do their jobs well? A coordinated approach across HR, IT, and functional teams will set your new hire up for success and ramp them more quickly.

I recently sat down with Adam Faludi, Enboarder’s global customer support manager, to learn more about the onboarding journey he’s built out for his new hires. Here are his onboarding ideas:

  • Preboarding: The week before they start, send your new hire a high-level overview of what they can expect in their first couple of weeks. Learn more about why preboarding matters here.
  • Personalization: One of the first sessions in Adam’s onboarding process is “Discover Our Worlds” – where new hires have the opportunity to share how they like to work and receive feedback and praise. That way the onboarding process can be tailored to their specific preferences and working style.
  • Weekly themes: Organize your onboarding around different topics. Adam created weekly themes, like “get to know the customer success team” and “learn customer success processes.”
  • Check-ins: At the start of each week, Adam schedules a meeting to talk about learnings from the week prior and answer any questions that have come up during onboarding.

Use an onboarding platform to centralize the process

You can use an intelligent journey platform like Enboarder to create a streamlined onboarding process across multiple locations. And by integrating Enboarder with your HRIS, new hires can be automatically dropped into a specific onboarding journey as soon as the offer letter is signed. Throughout that journey, you can drip-feed information your new hire will need about your ticketing systems and/or CRM platform.

Use common scenarios for role playing

Help your new customer service rep build confidence with role-playing activities during onboarding. You’ll want to provide a mix of common, difficult, and rare customer issues, and include team-based role-playing so your new hire understands how to address escalations and handoffs.

Provide access to support and feedback loops

The most successful onboarding for customer service teams is grounded in relationships. This might include a mentor program, where new hires are paired with more experienced reps. As mentioned above, you’ll also want to build in regular check-ins between your new hire and their hiring manager to discuss progress, challenges, and areas for improvement.

Create a welcoming environment

This is where culture, from the 4 Cs, comes to life. Think about all the different ways you can help your new hires experience your culture firsthand. Beyond sharing information about your company values, you’ll want to facilitate meet-and-greets with the team and celebrate your new hire’s achievements across milestones in their onboarding journey. Check out these employee engagement stats to see why creating a welcoming experience is so critical to your bottom line.

Ensure knowledge transfer

With high employee turnover, there’s a constant need for training and retraining in customer service. During your offboarding process, you’ll want to make sure there’s a clear knowledge transfer from departing employees to your new hires. You can also gather insights during onboarding that can help you identify areas for improvement in your onboarding process and across the entire employee experience. 

Metrics for Measuring Customer Service Onboarding Success

How will you know if your onboarding program is working? Here are a few metrics you’ll want to start tracking:

Retention Rates 

This is the percentage of new hires who stay after a specific time period. Studies show it can take six months to break even on a new hire – meaning only after six months on the job does a new hire start adding value to the organization. That means new hires who voluntarily leave before six months put a significant strain on productivity and morale.

Time to First Customer Interaction

This is the time it takes your new hire to handle their first customer inquiry independently.

First Touched Time

This can also be referred to as “first response time,” and describes how long it takes for customer service to respond the first time a ticket is received.

New Hire Time to Productivity

How you define productivity will be determined by your specific performance benchmarks, such as resolving a certain number of tickets.

Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT)

This is a measure of how satisfied customers are with the support they receive from your new hire. Average CSAT falls around 75-85%.

First Call Resolution Rate (FCR)

This is the percentage of tickets resolved during the first interaction. The average FCR rate across industries is about 70%.

Average Handle Time (AHT) or Call Handle Time (CHT)

This is the average duration of a customer interaction, including talk time and after-call work. A successful onboarding program will give your new hire the tools they need to answer questions quickly and efficiently, decreasing AHT.

Training Completion Rates

Here you’re tracking the percentage of training modules and activities completed during onboarding.

Error Rates

This is the frequency of mistakes or incorrect resolutions by new hires during customer interactions. Average error rate for call centers falls around 1-2%.

Ticket Escalation Rate

This is the percentage of customer inquiries that new hires escalate to high-level support teams. Average ticket escalation rate is 5-10% across industries. 

Effective Onboarding for New Customer Service Hires with Enboarder

Onboarding your new customer service team members doesn’t have to be a burden. Enboarder’s intelligent journey platform can help you design best-practice, cross-functional onboarding journeys that connect your new customer service reps with the right people, tools, and training they need to resolve issues and provide a stellar customer experience.

If you don’t use onboarding software to automate the cumbersome administrative tasks and optimize performance over time, what are you waiting for?

Book your demo of Enboarder today!

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