3 minute read
Patron News
As We Start to Return from Turbulent Times, is your Business Focussed on
People Recruitment?
BT Local Business Liverpool shares how it is addressing its latest recruitment drive and the challenge to find good long term team members.
Why so important?
Having struggled to get recruits familiar with a complex role, it often felt only the strongest survived, and getting to them delivering great customer service and their targets proved tough.
Managers were responsible for recruiting, training, and developing. Once trained, retention rate was good, but getting there was a struggle. Understanding BT systems, products, services, and the workings of a large company, often proved too much for new recruits.
• 46% never made it past the first year. • Average starter that left within first year cost us £15,200. • 13 months was the average time it took us to develop see them achieve their personal targets and deliver a ROI.
The challenge.
We decided to recruit and retain 8 desk sales executives, meaning employing around 16 and a potential loss of approx. £121,600. To address, we invested in a Learning and Development manager, and created a Graduate Bay, ensuring recruits were given clear guidance, set expectations and 1-2-1 coaching.
Enter existing employee Becky Roberts, who wanted a fresh challenge. Becky immediately set some key objectives: • Getting people to apply is hard and competitive on salaries. To sell ourselves and help people understand what a BTLB looked like, we did snippet interviews and created videos on
YouTube. BTLB - Liverpool, Chester and
North Wales - YouTube • Induction pathway detailing training, development, and expectations of the recruits, and more importantly, what they could expect from Becky. • Side by side coaching, delivering focus and value. • Planned regular catch ups and assessments.
The Outcome
• 7 who joined are still with us, giving 100% retention. • All 7 in our Graduate Bay are achieving their phased targets, with several exceeding.
We had our ROI back in the first 6 months. Better still, we have not seen those historic retention rates, making the company a better place to work, as no one likes to see people come and go.
One last “WIN WIN”
With the positive ROI, we are recruiting further to make our total 10. Additionally, when we conduct interviews, we are also able to introduce potential recruits to existing Grad Bay members who are enthused by their achievements to date and the whole training programme.
Chamber Patron Takes “Jerry McGuire” Approach.
Face for Business provide outsourced reception services, and are confronting the challenges of 2021 head on. Do you want lots of customers where you provide a reasonable service or do you want less customers, who feel valued, loved and really appreciate your service...! Yes, they know it sounds like Tom Cruise from Jerry McGuire and yet it is really is their view too.
They have a mission statement – ‘to overdeliver on everything we promise’ and working towards this is a key focus of their business strategy for this year.
With this in mind, they have recently appointed a Quality Manager Helen Christian, who is heading up the company’s quality programme.
Helen explains “For us the gold standard is when clients’ callers leave the call in a positive manner and actually enjoyed the call to our client’s company, just good enough is not enough, callers need to leave the call feeling valued...!” ‘Over the years we have developed a 12-week Induction programme with a combination of ‘classroom’ and ‘at desk’ training. Our new starters not only develop valuable customer service and telephone skills, but learn the ‘FFB way’ – that is, the quality standard, the icing on the cake, that propels our service above and beyond our competitors’.
‘Similarly, with new customers, one to one training is completed to introduce and familiarise their business to our call handlers, enabling callers to receive the fantastic service they deserve.
‘Our key USP is that we record all of our calls. Our customers can listen to all of the calls that we take for them and then provide us with feedback. This gives them peace of mind that their calls are being handled in a quality manner, and gives us valuable feedback, enabling us to further improve our service.
‘All in all we believe that we are developing a Training Programme that will underpin our vision ‘to be the UK’s most trusted business support service by 2025, providing our customers with fantastic service and our staff with all the development tools that they need to provide it ’
For more info on how your callers could feel the Face for Business Gold Standard please contact us at www.ffb.co.uk or
