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If the rapidly-changing call center world wasn’t already difficult enough to navigate, COVID-19 has made it much harder to keep up with trends and demands. If having to deal with angry customers, strict work schedules, penny-pinching upper management, and super high expectations wasn’t enough, companies are now having to deal with the challenges of remote work, COVID-19 protocols, competition from additional market opportunities, and a shortened supply of talent.

Around the world, when most contact centers want to screen for language ability, they consider an interview-style assessment. While there are several commercial test products that use interview-style tasks, these tests are generally very expensive and have inefficiencies in the return time for scoring. As a result, many organizations will move language screening  processes in-house and use their existing language resources—if they have any—to conduct language screening interviews.

Do you hire bilingual speakers? If so, when was the last time you considered updating your bilingual hiring process? Automated language assessments are the way of the future, reducing friction, unnecessary costs, and inaccuracies from your process to help you build a reputation for high-performing, language-qualified talent. 

Especially in the contact center and BPO industries, all of the time you spend hiring new agents needs to really count. The competition for great agents is stiff, and most candidates are applying to multiple positions at the same time. So, how can you know you’re getting the most out of your interviews? These insights should help.

Diversity and bias are big conversation topics in the hiring space recently. Organizations have appointed new heads of diversity, equity, and inclusion to lead out in improvement efforts, and they’re serious about making our workplace a better environment for marginalized groups. This work is so important and impactful for the future of our world. It also helps our organizations run better overall—with a more diverse workforce, you can see a 15-35% increase in your financial performance.

The BPO and contact center industries are notorious for difficult hiring conditions. High quality recruits are hard to find, and even harder to retain. So, if you’re looking to boost retention, we’ve got you covered. Check out these six strategies you can implement to keep more employees in your seats for longer.

For more and more global companies, developing a multilingual workforce is not just a competitive advantage, but a necessity. Companies that focus on developing and measuring the language ability of its team benefit from removing communication barriers for internal collaboration as well as delivering excellent service in customers’ native language. Language testing is key to developing the multilingual abilities of your team, but implementing a process that is effective and fair can be a challenge. In many cases, an ineffective and unreliable language testing process carries the risk of  slowing  hiring, lowering retention, and causing massive headaches for operations managers. 

At Emmersion, our vision for our work is to close the global communication gap. We do this by enhancing, credentialing, and supporting the learning of languages. However, we do not believe the burden to close this gap falls solely on language-learners. Native and mastery-level users of a language also have a responsibility to create language communities that are open and accommodating to language-learners.

Did you know that the contact center industry is poised to grow by 190 billion dollars in the next 6-10 years? Taking advantage of that growth is on everyone’s minds, and you can do it by building your reputation as a company that truly delivers on high-quality language ability. Here’s how you can find and showcase great communicators in your organization to win, grow, and retain business for your contact center.

Have you ever made a customer service call that left you feeling frustrated, defeated, and no closer to solving your original problem?