CONTACT CENTER SKILLS
PART 3
BY APRIL CANTWELL, HARVER
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
WHY SCREENING HARDER WON’ T WIN
THERE IS A NEW APPROACH TO ATTRACTING AND KEEPING TALENT.
Contact centers must deliver more than they ever have before. Interactions are more complex, customers are less patient, products are more configurable, and channels now span voice, chat( including video), email, and social platforms.
In response, organizations have steadily raised the bar for what“ good” talent looks like. In this article, which I have divided into three parts, I focus on three skill areas where the hiring bar is rising fast.
20 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
I covered digital and AI literacy in Part 1 and emotional intelligence in Part 2. Language skills is examined here in Part 3, along with the conclusion for all three parts.
LANGUAGE EXPECTATIONS AND SKILLS
Language expectations in contact centers have changed meaningfully over the last decade. Language proficiency is increasingly being treated as a core job skill rather than as a hiring preference.
In North American contact centers, this most often begins with English proficiency. But increasingly it extends to Spanish, Canadian French, and in some markets, additional languages such as Mandarin( Chinese) or Russian, depending on the customer base and delivery model.