21 Skills You Must Test For The Perfect Call Center Assessment

You have often heard, no matter what you say, say it confidently anyway.

Not all consumers are well-informed; some are even ill-informed and believe what they know or say is nothing but the truth. Some others may not be well-versed in telephone etiquette or display a shocking lack of knowledge, but your employees must be able to manage such situations seamlessly. They must be patient enough to provide the right information and have the self-control to not let the conversation spiral out of control. Nobody has ever loved a conversation with someone with a bad temper!

Perhaps one of the most understated yet the most critical attribute for a successful call center employee is possessing empathy, not just for customers but also for colleagues. It is not easy working at ungodly hours, servicing clients who may be cheesed off for numerous reasons. Someone may have had a bad cab ride and feels insulted or unsafe; someone else may have missed an important connecting flight and is now stuck in some foreign land, banking on your company’s customer support. A subtle gesture of making people feel comfortable and safe, that you are there for them and will lend a helping hand, do whatever it takes, is priceless. Such a behavior wins you life-long clients who trust you with their problems and are your organization’s most committed ambassadors.

Working in a call center environment is a challenging proposition, and not everyone is cut out for it. It involves working long hours, being constantly on calls, working in rotational shifts at odd hours and with a multigenerational workforce (we are keeping the list short). They may even be required to work on national holidays, festivals and birthdays! Such varied and somewhat unique elements demand individuals with high levels of adaptability. Continually evolving consumer preferences may also mandate learning new skills and the ability to upskill reasonably quickly - why we believe adaptability matters.

Imagine speaking with your relatives for two straight hours and hearing them crib about what they did not like about you the last time they saw you. Not a pretty picture, isn't it? Now multiply that by four and some more, and you are looking at a call center employee’s typical workday. Furthermore, it requires continually conversing with consumers with a pleasant demeanor and establishing rapport by cold calling. Such exercises have excruciatingly low conversion rates. Simply put, it is a high-stress job, and one can’t fathom a call center agent with no stress management ability. It is simply non-negotiable.

Times have changed. Office spaces are far more multicultural and ethnically diverse than before. Increased intra-state, interstate and global migration, triggered by globalization (please forgive me for harping about globalization; it is an old concept, and I plead guilty), have shaped such a trend. Your employees must treat their co-workers and consumers with dignity and respect, appreciate diversity and differences, and not discriminate on any possible ground. This is a must to ensure a progressive and forward-looking organization and workplace.

A good sales agent is a master of persuasion in written and verbal matters. He or she understands how to alter opinions, create favorable viewpoints and overcome real or perceived bottlenecks to convert business prospects into real and tangible sales. Such a skill is equally handy in facilitating quicker decision-making (we will get to decision-making in more detail very soon) in a team setting, saving time to focus more on execution than ideation. I hope I have persuaded you enough!

A collective effort always outshines individual brilliance - that is just life. Great teams, not great individuals, make prolific organizations. Don’t trust me. You must onboard employees with a deep sense of teamwork and the ability to take everybody along. Organizations chalk out long-term roadmaps, but every employee must be equally invested in those dreams for them to fructify. One can only achieve the desired results by working together with a sense of common purpose and vision.  Also, a routine customer call may require multiple touch-points to assuage their concerns. Therefore, the ability to work seamlessly in a team is highly desired in a good center employee.

A fast-paced work environment mandates employees who possess superlative decision-making skills. Whether to escalate the call to a superior or use hands-on skills to address the consumer’s problem oneself, which emails to answer first and which ones can be addressed later- these are some of the many challenges that confront a call center agent daily. Decision-making abilities are crucial to ensure seamless functioning, and an assessment test for a call center agent must evaluate the prospect’s decision-making abilities. Several companies offer a call center situational judgment test concerning inbox prioritization, which assesses their understanding and execution abilities by prioritizing the task at hand in the desired order.

Let’s face it, no matter your quality of service and product, conflicts occur in businesses. You can’t please everybody! What you can do, however, is have individuals who can resolve conflicts effectively and efficiently. A call handling test can provide you with the necessary insight into their abilities to mitigate conflicts and offer solutions to clients. Internally too, even the most cohesive and well-oiled teams have issues and disputes. These are not dirty words! Individuals must possess conflict resolution skills to ideate a mutually-accepted way forward to ensure the team can perform competently and collectively. We understand that you may be a tad overwhelmed by the number of attributes you must ascertain to correctly evaluate interpersonal skills. You don’t need to be an assessment wonk to find the best-fit candidates. Companies such as ours, and many more, offer specialized psychometric and personality tools to evaluate the candidates’ personalities and also enable you to create personalized assessments on the skills mentioned above. That’s not all! You can even tailor-make call center pre-employment testing assessments for additional skills that you reckon will help you find that ideal candidate.

Organizations, nowadays, must innovate continually to stay relevant. A stream of new products, services and offers is necessary to keep the consumers interested and engaged in your company as shortening attention spans and a flurry of information through diverse channels are likely to distract even your most ardent and long-term clients. You can’t take them for granted. But how do you communicate your innovations and updates effectively? Your call center employees are your emissaries who can provide your clients with all the information concerning product updates, latest offers and new offerings. There is a catch, though. While internalizing information is the key to a good call center employee, the pace of internalizing data and information is equally important. Learning agility measures a person’s ability to unlearn, relearn and his or her orientation to learning. Not everyone can process information at an equal pace. Such an assessment allows you to identify your best employees and train those who may not yet be adequately prepared to assume consumer-facing roles.

It’s the data, stupid! (Due credit to James Carville, who coined the term “It’s the economy, stupid” that got Bill Clinton the coveted ticket to the White House and denied George Bush Senior a second term. More on that some other time.) Vast tracts of data are processed daily by leading companies. They may be related to consumer behavior, a product’s traction in specific geographies or what works or does not for a certain age group. They continually tweak their messaging based on such crucial statistical information to remain relevant. Your call center employees must be able to decipher such continual streams of information and deduce rational conclusions or inferences to position your company’s viewpoint efficiently. You must conduct an aptitude test to measure their logical abilities.

Multitasking is a great virtue. The ability to perform multiple activities simultaneously ensures optimal call handling time, which is the time taken to complete an end-to-end conversation with a caller. We have often faced not-so-enjoyable moments where we have been put on hold for several minutes while the call center executives note down our requests or suggestions or dig in their files to answer our queries. And we drown in the pre-recorded message relayed incessantly by a lady who commends our patience and assures us that someone will serve us very shortly (Oh, the horror! I don’t trust her one bit). Albeit momentary, such pauses impede a seamless customer service experience, invariably denting your standing as a consumer-centric company. Consumers hate being stood up. Your employees must be able to engage your callers while typing on the computer. They must be able to quickly lookup the product details or the progress made on the service request, ideally, without having to put your caller on hold. Therefore, you must lend particular emphasis to determine your employees’ multitasking skills.

An overused expression on resumes; a jargon that ironically has not been given the due attention - I can go on. Attention to detail encompasses one’s ability to listen intently, plan meticulously and execute impeccably. It may involve one’s ability to follow a set of instructions without missing out on minor details and perform a required task with the desired quality. Attention to detail and the work’s quality are interconnected. Great attention to detail enables heightened efficiencies too. I think I have made my point. Several assessment companies in the market, such as Mercer | Mettl, offer pre-built and customizable tools to assess the cognitive skills and attributes mentioned above to gauge candidates’ employability. You may even create your own tests on the competencies that you believe work best for you. (It’s a free world, after all).

Your employees can’t execute the desired duties without a discernible command over the preferred language of communication and its grammar, which in most cases happens to be English. It is as simple as that. You don’t want your employees to speak or write wrong English or make trivial errors in their verbal or written communication. It obviously jeopardizes your company’s standing in the eyes of your customers but also dampens your business pitch.

Voice and accent proficiency evaluation is the gold standard to ascertain candidates’ employability and the crux of a call center quality assessment. Candidates are evaluated on neutral English accent, dialect and phonology, besides gauging their pronunciation of the words. These attributes that also include tone and intonation, cumulatively impact the quality of the communication and its effectiveness. A sentence’s intention, meaning and outcome may change significantly, depending on which part of the sentence is stressed and which is not. “Hello, Mr. Smith, would you be interested in a brief discussion? We would like to share our newest offerings and their benefits to you.” Or “Hey, Mr. Smith, we are delighted to share that we have launched some new offerings that would benefit you immensely. I highly recommend you to hear me out!” Depending on where the stress is and how the sentences are spoken, they create a different feeling, don’t they? That can be the difference between a successful sale and a valiant attempt! Such technical elements are assessed comprehensively to measure a candidate’s fitment for call center operations. Typically, a VNA (Voice and Accent) trainer evaluates candidates to enable companies to choose the best fit, also earmarking those who can become call-center-ready after training on certain drawbacks identified during the examination. VNA trainers do so by using the CEFR framework, one of the many frameworks to assess a non-native English speaker’s English-speaking proficiency. The framework entails three core dimensions of language activities, domains in which they occur, and drawn competencies when engaged. It divides learners into three segments, which is further bifurcated into six levels of language proficiency. The three segments include basic users, independent users and proficient users. Thus, VNA assessors are able to identify trainable and non-trainable candidates and their proficiency levels. For instance, if someone says, “Seet,” instead of “sheet,” it is considered a non-trainable error. Such a process is the backbone of a voice and accent test. 

Email communication is equally a mode of customer outreach undertaken by call center employees. It is the next logical step after a telephonic sales pitch or a product brief wherein they enumerate the advantages of buying a particular product or service and establish the benefits that the prospects would accrue. Such a communication may also be related to assuaging a concern outlined by a consumer, to assure him or her of your company’s best efforts and intentions. Such matters are sensitive and must be tackled professionally. Therefore, writing lucid and succinct emails is as important, if not more, as the ability to make meaningful, insightful telephonic conversations. Such emails must include a catchy subject line and CTA and be mindful of cultural and social sensitivities. They must also be legible, free of grammatical and punctuation errors, why we stressed good grammar and English, and why you must consider an English grammar test and a language test for call center prospects.

I think this is a reasonably self-explanatory argument. Put yourself in the consumers’ shoes. You won’t relish talking with someone who can’t pronounce and speak clearly, who fumbles and mumbles his or her words, has a thick accent (no disrespect!) or lacks the clarity of expressions. The choice of words and phrases, and their sequence, also profoundly impact the communication pitch. Proficient call center employees are mindful of such nuances, incorporate them in their outreach and make subtle variations depending on the client with whom they are conversing. Therefore, the clarity of speech is integral to the call center quality assurance metrics. Given the mushrooming of call centers the world over, numerous service providers now offer tools to measure the voice and accent and English proficiency. SpeechX is one such industry-leading, fully-automated and auto-graded tool that replicates a VNA (voice and accent) trainer. It is powered by artificial intelligence technology and uses the world-renowned CEFR framework to replicate a VNA trailer. It uses Proprietary Speech Analytics and Carnegie Speech’s patented Speech Recognition Engine and Pinpointing Technology. It is combined with proprietary voice analytics.

A product or service is only as efficient as its understanding and articulation by a salesperson. A BPO employee must possess explicit knowledge of the company’s SOPs, which mustn’t be rote learning, rather a deeper understanding of its procedures. Consumers expect call center agents to possess all company information at the fingertips. Any unexpected delay may create an unfavorable impression, lowering your chances of acquiring or retaining such clients. Therefore, you must evaluate your prospective employees’ understanding of your company’s policies, programs, products and services before you onboard them. And their inclination toward internalizing them. (Learning agility works here too!)

Considerable typing skills are critical to efficiently communicating information with peers and callers, adding new information to a database and optimizing the time taken to handle a call from start to finish. Speed and accuracy are equally important aspects of typing skills and must be thoroughly analyzed to maintain a high degree of consumer satisfaction and company data accuracy.

We have saved the most basic for the last. Can you fathom a call center employee without a working knowledge of a computer, its operation, and how to retrieve and store information when needed? No! Because computer literacy is the backbone of any modern-day office operation. All call centers run on computers, and therefore, you simply can’t hire anyone with no knowledge of how to work online. A candidate must be computer literate even to attempt an assessment test for a call center agent. Therefore, it is highly desired that you conduct a call center computer skills test.