In the world of customer service, frontline roles are evolving and are doing so rapidly. As higher levels of self-service and the utilisation of artificial intelligence, chat bots and other tech applications take hold, frontline customer service roles are evolving such that they are now starting to require deeper level thinking and problem solving skills.
This is supported by research done by BT futurist Nicola Millard who published a report in 2014 called SuperAgent 2020, which found that the 2 most important skills for frontline agents in the coming years will be communication skills and problem solving skills.
However, considering this and traditional methods of recruitment……how do you know if someone has these sort of skills?
And, can you discern and judge if they have them or not from a CV? Or, from an interview process?
Possibly.
But, many firms are now starting to question whether or not traditional methods of recruitment are the best ways to identify and recruit these sort of skills.
One such company is Wayfair, an online home furnishings and décor items retailer, who is rapidly innovating around their recruitment practices in order to make sure that they attract, identify and recruit the sort of talent that they need to continue to deliver their award-winning customer service.
In an interview with Liz Graham, Vice President of Sales and Service at Wayfair, she told me about a couple of new and innovative initiatives that they have recently implemented:
What is clear is that, in the future, firms will need to recruit people that are not only technically proficient but are also creative, problem solvers, team players and great communicators if they are to deliver the level of service that they and their customers want.
However, firms like Wayfair realise that the CV and the traditional interview process is just not going to cut it and have started to develop innovative recruitment methods so that they can continue to evolve the way that they identify and recruit the skills and talent that they need to fuel their future growth.
They’ve started. Have you?
This post was originally published on my Forbes column.
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