AI Can Help Contact Centers Address the Talent Shortage

In a tumultuous time for businesses and workers alike, the extended pandemic exacerbated by the "Great Resignation" has positioned employers to rely on creativity in building resource solutions.

While technology and automation have been helpful to business productivity, it has not been embraced by workers and consumers across the board. Studies have shown that too much reliance on consumer-facing technology can be overburdening, leading to negative customer effort scores (CESs). Yet, converting manual, time-consuming processes to automated ones can have a positive effect; it provides for more time to focus on the customer and less on behind-the-scenes tasks.  

Perfect Balance of Human/Automation

How can contact centers best apply today’s tech solutions to improve processes to deliver higher-quality customer experiences? A good, and much-needed, area to begin with is recruitment of talent.

In an era in which unemployment is less than 5 percent and jobs are going unfilled for months, businesses are under pressure to add qualified talent at a rapid pace; “qualified” being the operative word. Yet employers continue to focus on reducing new hire failure rates and decreasing turnover.

Employee turnover is expensive and has been exacerbated by the competitive nature of today’s labor market. However, identifying the talent needed with the right mix of skills and temperament is becoming more difficult using legacy recruiting and hiring approaches. For example, hiring a “tech savvy” agent to work on a customer care queue is less important than one who possesses an informative, positive, clear-in-direction, adaptable demeanor and personality.  

Given the competitiveness in recognizing skilled talent in the market and matching candidate profiles with the applicable job role, companies are being challenged to rethink their hiring strategies.

In 2017, the average length of time for the interviewing process of a candidate was 23.7 days, according to analysis by Glassdoor. In the current “Great Resignation” situation, candidates have the upper hand in choosing where they want to be employed and the process for getting those recruits onboard has lengthened dramatically. In fact, in August 2021, LinkedIn examined 400,000 confirmed hires over the past year on its platform to determine the recruitment process length. For customer service roles, the average increased by 47 percent to more than 34 days.  In this industry, the ability to ramp up to meet seasonal and other client volume-increase demands is critical. An extended hiring process drives a 30 percent decrease in the candidate pool and in turn will affect revenue and customer satisfaction.

As more tasks get automated, businesses are looking for candidates with technical experience. Or, in cases with consumer-facing job positions, requirements can be more geared toward “soft skills”—communication, creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, and cultural understanding.

Checking the boxes that align with the job description list can be done easily through AI-enabled applicant tracking system (ATS) scanning software, but how can company recruiters swiftly and accurately elevate the best candidates, especially when time is of the essence—whether the company is ramping up for seasonal hires, launching a new product or service, or experiences times of crisis? 

AI to Expedite the Process

By integrating a leading pre-employment assessment platform in the recruitment process, companies can align candidate profiles with job requirements and quickly ramp up services and deliver a more-mature support team to address customers’ needs.

How it’s used: While it depends on the job role, the process may include:  

• Personality assessment
• Situational judgment tests
• Typing skills assessment
• Language literacy
• Work-from-home system diagnostics

It may also allow the employer to include videos that explain the job, the company culture, and the working environment to better set expectations.  

Ultimately, using an AI platform can help companies optimize the recruitment process, helping candidates better visualize and understand what the actual contact center experience will be like. In turn, it improves candidate experience.

Benefits of using the technology: Candidates can apply and take assessments at their convenience, and pause and return to complete as time permits. They don’t have to go to a physical location, which can be difficult amid a pandemic or when there are other personal or time demands. The technology improves both an office environment and a work-from-home situation. 

This precise hiring focus completes the initial screening for the recruiting team, reducing by more than 50 percent the time spent manually filtering a pool of candidates. In our experience with this technology, by getting quality resources on staff rapidly, CGS experienced a 15 percent improvement in customer satisfaction while lowering the customer effort score.

Conclusion

By using AI, CGS added over 500 qualified customer representatives/agents and shortened the timeline from recruitment through onboarding by 40 percent. In our testing of the application, more than 20 percent of the company’s recruits in Romania went through the process; and feedback provided by candidates was monitored in real time for each stage of recruitment. On average, the entire automated process takes 1 to 2 days compared with 4 to 5 days for the standard one. 

Automating the new-hire assessment process created focused and expedited recruiting and, more importantly, improved precision. Adding AI was critical to the company’s ability to reduce employee attrition during the training/nesting phase by minimizing mismatched expectations. In a low unemployment market, companies can use a boost.

Steven Petruk is president, Global Outsourcing division, for CGS and has more than 25 years of experience in IT, infrastructure, and customer service. He leads the company’s executive and global delivery team in the development and implementation of technology-based outsourced solutions. Petruk is responsible for introducing AI-enriched chatbot and RPA technologies as well as augmented reality solutions that complement the customer support services provided by thousands of multilingual call center agents. Prior to joining CGS, he served in executive roles at Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions and IBM.