How To Hire And Train Customer Support Frontline Agents

How to hire and train customer support frontline agents

Your frontline customer support agents are those employees that your customers interact with every time they approach your company. This could be for the purpose of gaining further information, resolving queries, expressing grievances or other such instances that cannot be satisfied by the company information, blogs, FAQs and resources that you have provided. Frontline customer support agents can be a part of your organisation or an outsourced team of experts, operating on your behalf.

Though the idea of frontline employees or customer support agents is old, the pandemic threw light on the true nature and importance of the role that they play.

Another term that rightly describes them is ‘first responder’.

As the name suggests, first responders are the earliest ones to react to any customer call, email, chat or message. The better your company is at responding promptly and effectively, the better is your CX. Apart from which, your frontline customer support agents offer your brand a face and personality while being the ambassadors of your brand values and mission.

You may also like: How To Improve Your Response Rate

Now that we’ve established the relevance and importance of having superior frontline customer support agents, how does one find them? And in case you already possess a team of frontline agents, how can you ensure they do their job well, helping your customer base to stay and grow?

Hiring Customer Support Agents

As mentioned earlier, customer support agents can be inhouse or outsourced.

Many small and mid sized companies prefer to hire a well equipped customer support company to handle all their customers. They find it easier to hand over this responsibility rather than find the right agents and keep training them.

Just to give an idea, here are some of the skills required when identifying the perfect customer support agents:

1) Excellent Emotional Intelligence and Communication

It goes without saying that a successful customer support agent needs to be a good problem solver. The ability to listen carefully, understand the issue and offer a temporary or permanent solution requires high emotional intelligence and communication skills.

Though this sounds straightforward, it’s not easy to learn these traits. An individual who intrinsically lacks these skills cannot be trained to develop them. One needs to have them to some degree to begin with. Communication in customer support refers to mastery over the language being used, the ability to explain complicated matters in a simple manner and maintaining a cordial tone.

2) Good Knowledge and Resourcefulness

Naturally, agents are not born with knowledge about your company, products or services. These may be imparted over time. However, what one can gauge when hiring a candidate, is the individual’s ability to understand, retain and utilise the information being given to them.

This form of intelligence differs from emotional intelligence. It comes from experience and the ability to grasp and deliver the right information that a customer requires. Resourcefulness is a trait that helps agents to research and find the apt answers from a resource bank that is available to them, when interacting with customers. This ability also depends on how well stacked and organised your resource bank is.

3) Passion and Willingness to Help People

Every customer support agent must hold an innate liking towards helping people. Without this, being a frontline customer support agent can be stressful and frustrating. Equipped with the passion to assist those in need is a definite advantage and is linked to other people skills such as empathy, teamwork, problem solving and going above and beyond in this job.

How To Train A Frontline Customer Support Agent

Interview round

Your personal interviews with chosen customer support candidates will create a good foundation for their further training, if selected. Questions such as ‘how they handled any workplace challenges’ or ‘how they would react to certain situations at work’ are known as behavioural questions. They give good insight into an agent’s mindset, approach and experience.

Setting expectations in the beginning

Create a document that clearly states what you expect from the agent. Review this list regularly to gauge progress. Don’t assume that the agent will know what to say and how to say it, without basic training.

Focus on specialised skills

Customer service skills involve dealing with a variety of customer-related scenarios using certain strategies. This is how best practises are learnt and adhered to.

Appreciate good work

No matter how small an achievement, always congratulate and encourage a job well done by a frontline customer support agent. This reinforces desired behaviour in a positive manner.

Keep improving

When you have a team of frontline customer support agents, you should keep training them on a regular basis. Keep them up to date with the latest strategies, technologies and methods.

Conduct motivational programs and be available for any issues they may be facing.

Training a frontline customer support team is a full time job.

These are some of things agents handle:

Resolving issues and conflicts
Assisting with order placement, cancellation or refund.
Explaining products and services
Resolving payment or bill related issues
Helping to create their personal accounts

And more!

This is why most Startups and SMEs prefer to outsource the hiring and training of their frontline customer support agents. If you are a fresh company or a partly established one that needs well trained customer support agents, contact us to know the benefits of outsourcing this function.