Every day, people on your team deftly field questions from employers and job seekers.
They patiently resolve billing and timesheet issues.
They connect customers with other members of your staff to provide an amazing experience working with your staffing agency.
But did you know…
Your customer service team can do more than just answer questions and escalate issues; they can help drive revenue!
If you don’t think of customer service as a profit center, consider the impact of client and candidate attrition on your company’s bottom line. If you want to learn more about the concept, I’ve written several posts exploring the relationship among shareworthy service, customer retention and staffing agency profitability:
- Staffing Customer Retention: 3 Ways to Keep from “Getting the Boot”
- Stop the Churn! Practical Customer Service Tips to Increase Client Retention
- Are You Tracking These 3 Customer Service Metrics?
So, how can you measure the impact of customer support on your retention rates – and ultimately move the needle in the right direction?
This Help Scout post shared several ways customer support can boost your bottom line by increasing customer retention:
- Know your numbers. Start by understanding – and tracking – the customer service metrics that impact your staffing agency’s performance. Knowing your KPIs is the first step in determining where you can make the most meaningful changes.
- Onboard customers quickly. Consider ways process improvement and technology could help speed service delivery. On the candidate side, look for ways to simplify the application process, accelerate candidate intake and prevent communication vacuums that lead to dropoff.
- Ask good questions. Train your entire team to be curious and ask insightful questions. The process will help reveal a customer’s true goals, provide more useful solutions, and give customers what they truly need – not just what they think they want.
- Practice good recovery skills. A client or candidate who experiences a problem with your firm, but is pleased with the way you resolve it, is more loyal than a customer who never experiences an issue. In this post, I share service recovery tips for your staffing firm.
- Answer, anticipate, elaborate. Instead of merely answering an employer’s or associate’s question, train your team to think about what else the customer may need – and then proactively share helpful resources or contextual information to expedite service. In this post I explain how to get inside your staffing customers’ heads and know what they want – even before they do.
While staffing customers ultimately choose to stay or leave based on a number of factors (e.g., pricing, competition, the effectiveness of your recruiters and account managers, etc.), gauging the impact of your customer service on retention rates can help you reduce churn – and grow a more profitable agency.
