Customer Service in Hiring

Your business lives and dies by the people it hires. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you’re hiring only the best of the best. The companies that hire top talent are going to be the ones that deliver the best results, and since employees usually represent your largest investment as a business, you want to make sure that everyone you bring in to your company has the ability to make it better.

But far too often, companies focus solely on education-related abilities. For example, how well someone knows computer software, or how well someone can do math. These qualities, while important, can sometimes cause companies to ignore soft skills, like customer service, that have extremely high value to the modern day business despite being difficult to measure.

That is why it is so important for companies to prioritize customer service in their recruitment practices. The companies that make sure that they always hire customer service experts are going to bring a great deal of value to their companies, through things like: Retaining Customers Employees are usually measured by their productivity, because companies are looking for a good return on investment.

But those with excellent customer service have value in a way that few companies measure – they improve customer retention. So if one employee brings $150,000 in value, while another employee brings $120,000 but – thanks to their customer service ability – they help save $70,000 worth in future purchases, the latter is actually more valuable to your company. Great customer service specialists also form relationships with customers that make customers feel guilty when they shop elsewhere, and this too, is important for customer retention.

Attracting Customers Word-of-mouth marketing is not dead. It still plays a very important role in attracting customers. An employee with excellent customer service is going to attract more customers than the ones that have poor customer service, no matter how productive that employee is.

Employee Retention Finally, in many ways, an employee that provides excellent customer service is often a happier employee. When an employee has positive interactions with customers, they too, tend to be happier at their jobs. That could reduce your turnover rate, which helps save you additional money in both time and training.

Ideally, you want to hire people with both talents – productivity/knowledge, and customer service ability. But given two candidates, where one is going to be slightly more productive than the other, the choice in who to hire may not be so obvious. You may want to hire the employee that will offer the best customer service, because that employee may be the one that offers more value to your company.