Applicant Screening and Testing: Is it Worth the Cost for Your Call Center?

It’s one thing for contact center managers to find and hire candidates who are reliable, patient, service-oriented, problem-solving, and effective communicators.

It is yet another to throw these new team members into the typically stressful environment of a contact center and retain them for as long as you’d like to make the recruiting and training process worth the investment of time and money.

Contact center managers know all too well the financial implications of this issue. Depending on whether a center’s purpose is to provide customer service, take orders, or provide technical support, the costs of hiring and training a new agent can average between close to $2000 to four times that amount depending on industry and call complexity. From best practice performance data captured by BenchmarkPortal, the average across industries is $6,268 per new hire.

Considering the prevalence of the agent turnover issue and its exorbitant cost to contact centers worldwide, we at BenchmarkPortal surveyed those in our benchmarking community for insights into this subject. Specifically, we wanted to hear from contact center professionals who were testing agent candidates and learn their opinion on the value of testing.

Is testing a cost effective way to help reduce turnover?

More than 700 contact center professionals, representing a wide array of industries, responded to our survey, which was sponsored by Kelly Services.

• Just over two in five survey participants said that they currently use a personality or aptitude test as part of [their] screening process for new hires.
• Of those who indicated that they did test, more than three fifths reported that they test all applicants. Just over one fifth test only those they intend to offer a job.
• More than 80% of those who test administer these tests in-house, as opposed to having a vendor administer them. And the average cost of completing each test was $44.50.
• Half of the contact center professionals who administer pre-employment testing have analyzed its impact. When asked how they analyzed this, the vast majority said that their organization looked at agent turnover and/or performance as key indicators of the test’s impact.

Perhaps the survey’s most telling data was the cumulative response to the question:

What is your current confidence level in the test’s ability to accurately predict a candidate’s success as a telephone agent?

Over 66 percent indicated a high or extremely high confidence level.

The survey’s bottom line?

While the contact center industry has yet to identify that magic cure-all, or so-called “silver bullet,” for rampant agent turnover, testing appears to be one of a number of cost effective initiatives to combat it.

Consider this:

The easiest way to gain valuable insight into your center’s current operations is to go to www.BenchmarkPortal.com and take the RealityCheck.

It's absolutely FREE! After you complete our brief survey, we immediately forward you information that compares your call center's performance against those in your industry and ranks your center’s relative efficiency and effectiveness. So what are you waiting for? It's fast, easy, and free! Do it today!

This article was sponsored by:

The College of Call Center Excellence

www.collegeofcallcenterexcellence.com/

About BenchmarkPortal, Inc.

BenchmarkPortal is the custodian of the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality database of contact center metrics, the largest in the world. It provides contact center leaders with reports, products, and services in the areas of operational metrics, customer satisfaction measurement, and agent satisfaction measurement. For more information about BenchmarkPortal, visit their website at: www.BenchmarkPortal.com.

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