Customer service is specialized service. You need quality professionals for the task. If you are looking to build up an inbound call center team that performs as per the international standards, you will have to ensure that you pick the right agents for the job. There are some key skills that the phone answering agents need. Generally those have nothing to do with the educational qualification. You can hire anyone with a simple background in academics. The hired BPO agent must be able to prepare reports and understand written instructions. The rest of it can be trained. What is most essential, however, is that the new recruits must have a keen sense of telemarketing. That is something that training rooms cannot teach. Without the knack for marketing, online and offline, a possible hire cannot be a promising asset for the call center.

You can depend on in-house referrals when you hire customer service agents. Let it out that your call center is hiring and ask your employees to suggest possible recruits. There are some definite advantages of hiring through this system. Firstly, you can depend on the employee to come up with a good prospect. Call centers generally offer incentives and monetary rewards when you have hired someone of their reference. It could be the salary that the new recruit will get or possibly more. That will egg on the existing employees to get quality people on board. They will also get their references trained for the interview. They will make the possible hires aware of your BPO unit and the rules. When you eventually hire them, you can cut down on the induction process and concentrate more on the training aspects.

Speech clarity and voice training are important aspects of customer service. They often define the quality of phone answering that a call center will do. Most call centers engage voice trainers to help the hired agents pick up some basic speaking skills before they take the floor. Clarity of speech also means getting rid of any unwanted accent on their language. Many telemarketing agents, when they are new to the job, feel compelled to use a fake American accent. They think that is makes them more acceptable to the American consumers. While there is no data to validate this, you can hear plenty of complaints from customers because they couldn't decipher the strange accent of the inbound call center agents that they talked to.

The BPO sector is dotted with telemarketing scams and other malpractices. When you are hiring someone for your call center, run them through the usual checks. Call the professional references and ensure that you speak to authentic sources. If the prospective hire has a history of misdemeanor or unscrupulous behavior in a previous telemarketing services unit, reject it immediately. It doesn't make much sense to risk your brand value and your client's business to get someone dubious on board. After you hire the agents, keep monitoring them for any unexplained behavior. Keep your data under strict supervision of the managers and team leaders.