Hiring great LiveChat agents is tough. They are the face of your brand and the first impression for everyone that visits your website.
Hiring great LiveChat agents is tough. They are the face of your brand and the first impression for everyone that visits your website. Not only that, but they need to know enough to help customers and think quickly since live chat is a real-time conversational channel.
Having amateur chat agents on your website can really hurt your brand, so the stakes are high when hiring agents. But there are a ton of great agents out there. If you run a good process, you can hire more agents easily and keep quality consistent as you grow.
At HelpFlow, we run 24/7 live chat teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. Over the last 6+ years, we’ve hired hundreds of live chat agents and have a bulletproof process to do it.
Yes, you can hire us to run chat for you (at a lower cost than DIY). But in this post, I’ll dig into our hiring process so you can use it yourself if you want to stay in-house. Let’s get into it.
I’m going to show you how we automate much of the initial screening process below. For now though, it’s important to aim for a large number of applicants from your job postings.
Post compelling job openings on the leading job boards in the areas you’re hiring from.
Take the time to make the job postings comprehensive and compelling. Don’t just mention the job title and responsibilities. Share a bit of the story of your company, what it’s like to work there, and growth opportunities. This will catch the attention of solid applicants looking through tons of job postings.
The goal is to get a ton of applications that you can run through a very efficient screening process, so you are only spending time on really good applicants later in the process.
Because live chat is a very specific role, there are a few key things that are important to test for when recruiting:
Below are a few simple hacks to screen people out that don’t make the cut on these aspects of the job.
You’re not able to easily test their ability to nail the above two things in a fast-paced environment, but this will screen out many unqualified people.
Next, you can test potential hires in action.
Once you have a list of potential applicants, schedule a few for 15 minute live chat interview sessions. This will give you the ability to see them chat and work through problems directly on chat, just like the job you’re hiring for.
The process here does not need to be complicated, but you do need to have a Live Chat software already set up. I will assume you have one as part of your helpdesk software - if you don’t, use a free trial to do this.
Have them come to your website or a hidden page on your website to start a chat at the scheduled time. Once they’re connected, you can give them a little bit of context on what will happen during the interview. Then get started with the below.
The application screening we started with will weed out a lot of unqualified people, but this live chat interview process will help you find the rock stars quickly (and disqualify bad fits in just a few mins). This takes about 10 or 15 minutes of time invested per applicant at this stage, and technically you can run two or maybe three interviews at the same time if you want to scale it.
After that, you can go through your normal final interview steps to gauge culture fit and economics, but the above will help you find great people quickly and consistently.
At HelpFlow, we provide 24/7 live chat teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. Our agents can chat with your visitors, answer their questions, and drive more sales.
Our pricing model is a flat fee for 24/7 coverage based on how much website traffic you have. All of our plans are structured in a way where you are effectively paying around three dollars per hour per agent that is needed to drive the results we drive on your site. Plus, the ROI we’re able to produce by driving more sales on your website is a no brainer (we cover this in the Strategy Call process upfront if you’re curious).
If you want to continue building a live chat team in-house at a higher rate, the above process will definitely help. But if you’re looking to scale a killer live chat team that drives results and is more cost-effective than running in-house, feel free to reach out.
HelpFlow can drive sales by having our team of human agents available on live chat 24/7 to predict and save abandons before they happen, proactively reach out and engage with visitors via SMS and email after they abandon, and by answering visitor questions live on your website to convert visitors.
Learn MoreHelpFlow can drive sales by having our team of human agents available on live chat 24/7 to predict and save abandons before they happen, proactively reach out and engage with visitors via SMS and email after they abandon, and by answering visitor questions live on your website to convert visitors.
Learn More