At Zoho, we get to talk to several startup founders and small business owners regularly. A good number of times, the topic of hiring and retention comes up in our conversations. We thought it might be a good idea to ask the community at large and understand the broad opinion.
We had asked a question on customer support hiring, via our poll last week. From our own experience, we’ve seen startups with very good process clarity as well as mid-sized businesses that prefer not to have strict processes. So, we were naturally excited to see what results would emerge from that question.
About 40% of all respondents said they preferred to hire experienced professionals and empower them suitably.
From a traditional standpoint, this feels like the optimal approach for any company that wants a ‘safe bet’. If you hire experienced customer support professionals, you can trust them to behave reasonably in most of the situations. In a sense, when you hire experienced professionals, you can expect them to hit the ground running. A lot of companies prefer to have that ‘celerity’ as a competitive edge. However, there’s also the downside that experienced professionals are ‘conditioned’ and don’t necessarily come with a completely fresh outlook. For some businesses, that can actually be a significant drawback.
About 60% of respondents said they preferred to hire fresh talent and train them internally.
This is definitely not an approach that leads to a safe bet. Over the last few years, if there has been one broad trend in customer service, it’s that companies are looking to create a customer service ‘culture’ that’s unique to themselves. Companies like Amazon have taken that trend to a whole new level. It’s pretty difficult to create a culture like that by hiring just experienced folks. So, companies prefer to set a culture in place and hire fresh talent. It’s far easier to align fresh talent to your company’s culture than to align experienced professionals.
It’s also fairly common for companies to maintain a good mix of both fresh and experienced talent. However, the ‘right mix’ is very tricky to attain. In a way, that’s one reason why it might be better to set a customer service culture for your company and hire accordingly.
That’s it for this week. We’ll get right back to you with another interesting question next week! Until then, have a great weekend!
Hiring the right people for a customer service position is a great start. But training should be a constant factor. In today's world where customer demands are changing abruptly, you should prepare your representatives to be adaptable and flexible because every experience is unique.