Agent Hiring & Training

Our corporate philosophy provides a solid commitment to our people and the quality of their lives, as well as their families. We fully understand that our employees are and always will be our most valuable asset and that the best people provide the best customer service. We attract and retain the best people for a few reasons:

CSR Minimum Qualifications
All of our representatives have to be a minimum of 18 years of age with a high school diploma or equivalent. If they do not meet this requirement, they must have two years of solid work experience (to demonstrate their work ethic and dependability). We advertise for customer service representatives in local newspapers, radio, and by offering employee referral bonuses. Employee referrals by far have been our most successful means of bringing in new representatives.

Screening Process
One manner in which our interviewers screen prospective representatives' voices is when they call in to our 800# in response to our advertisements. Those lacking the voice quality required for the customer service representative position are not brought in for an interview; if voice quality is acceptable, prospective agents are invited to come in to the call center for an interview.

Upon arrival, applicants are greeted and asked to complete an application. The application covers employment history, educational background, skills and qualifications, shift availability, and references. Applicants are also asked to take a written test covering their general computer knowledge as well as grammar and spelling. In addition, when applicable, a computer keyboard test is administered to determine if the applicant possesses the skills necessary to accurately capture data on behalf of our clients. Those passing the tests are then invited to participate in a role-play with a member of the interview team for purposes of evaluating their interpersonal skills and phone presence as well as their aptitude for inbound, outbound or both types of contact handling.

Once the application and tests have been completed, applicants are interviewed by trained interviewers and graded on various attributes, including:

Voice Quality
Friendliness/Phone Presence
Professional Demeanor
Work History and Experience
References
Computer/Grammatical Test Scores

The interviewer will then make the decision whether or not to hire the applicant.

To attract the right people, we've located our contact centers in some of the most beautiful rural settings in America, where good old-fashioned hard work, taking pride in one's labor and the desire to be helpful are not attributes we must instill in our people, it comes with the territory. We take an active role in each community that we're a part of and let our people know they're family. That's why we're able to enjoy low turnover and tremendous success by promoting from within.

The training process is divided into four primary categories:

Preliminary Training Sessions
The initial training serves as an introduction to American Customer Care. This training is specifically focused on company policies and procedures, stressing the importance of delivering a professional and courteous experience to your customer.

Technology Training
The more ways your customers are able to contact us, the more technology training needed to effectively handle those contacts. Our technology training sessions focus on both system hardware and user software in our customer call centers.

Customer Related Training
Project training is a collaboration of efforts between each individual client, their Account Manager and an assigned Trainer. The collective group determines what skill sets will enable the CSRs to most effectively handle the projects.

Periodic Recurrent Training
We routinely have recurrent training classes, focusing on specific skill sets, allowing the agent to refocus their efforts on delivering a quality one-call solution. These classes are normally 30 minutes in length.

We believe that for any organization to provide excellent customer service it must have a strong working partnership between its Training Department and its Quality Assurance Department. While these are two separate departments, they are the team that ensures our agent's success and growth.

All CSRs are monitored daily by a full time staff of Quality Assurance Managers. They are evaluated on 15 different criteria, the broad categories of which include product knowledge, telephone etiquette and demeanor, data entry and adherence to script. Feedback is disseminated to team leaders for immediate concerns as well as the training department for focus of future training efforts.