Providing excellent customer service is essential to business success, and your ability to earn repeat business directly impacts long-term success. Customers are 81% more likely to make subsequent purchases if they had a good experience during their first interaction.
When you provide clients with exceptional service, they become loyal to your brand. This loyalty helps you maximize customer retention rates and reduce churn, which is essential because acquiring new customers costs six to seven times more than retaining existing ones.
That brings us to the question, “How do I improve customer retention rates?” While there is no single answer, administering a customer service skills test to job applicants is a good place to start.
Customer service skills tests provide your hiring team with measurable data regarding each candidate’s skills, abilities, and aptitudes. This information helps them select the best candidates, ultimately improving the quality of customer service your clients receive. This enables you to improve retention and reduce churn. These are some customer service skills tests we recommend.
Best Customer Service Skills Tests for Maximizing Client Retention
Many skills tests can provide insights into an applicant’s ability to provide excellent customer service. However, eSkill’s Customer Service Skills Test is among the most popular and versatile if you need to evaluate candidates for customer-facing roles like call center agent and retail sales associate. Your HR team can use it to measure the customer service capabilities of other professionals as well.
The Customer Service Skills Test includes 40 multiple-choice, select all that apply, true/false, and simple select questions. The questions cover essential topics such as communication skills, teamwork and collaboration, adaptability, and problem-solving.
Generally, applicants who score well on this skills test are capable of delivering high-quality service to customers. If you want to gain even more insights into an applicant’s abilities and talents, you could pair the Customer Service Skills Test with other skills tests.
Other Customer Service Skills Tests You Should Be Using
Other skills tests can help your HR team screen customer service candidates. One example is Emotional Intelligence. Applicants with a high level of emotional intelligence will be better able to relate to a customer’s problems and devise solutions. They will also collaborate effectively with coworkers and interact harmoniously in the workplace.
Like the Customer Service Skills Test, the Emotional Intelligence Skills Test includes 40 questions of varying types. However, it covers topics like social intelligence, mastering emotions, and empathy.
Depending on your specific needs and the position requirements, you might also require the Logical Thinking, Verbal Reasoning, Following Directions, or Attention to Detail skills assessments. Alternatively, you could create a customized customer service skills test by choosing questions from one or more of these tests and adding your own questions.
Your hiring team can immediately access the results when candidates complete and submit skills tests. This expedites your screening process, reduces time-to-hire, and minimizes your risk of making bad hiring decisions. You will be able to provide a better service experience for customers, which will help your organization reduce client attrition.
When to Use a Customer Service Skills Test
To maximize efficiency, we recommend administering customer service skills tests early in the screening process so you can weed out unqualified candidates. This narrows the applicant pool and reduces the number of candidates your hiring team has to interview
Reducing the burden on your hiring team will improve morale, reduce costs, streamline the entire process and reduce time to hire. You will fill vacancies faster and address staffing shortfalls more efficiently. You will be able to extend employment offers to top candidates before your competitors hire them.
How to Obtain Expertly Created and Validated Skills Tests
You may be wondering if using customer service skills tests could expose your company to civil liability problems because you inadvertently violated equal employment opportunity laws.
If you partner with an established skills testing provider like eSkill, you do not need to be concerned because all our test questions are written and validated by subject matter experts (SMEs). In fact, we have tested millions of candidates over 20 years and have a perfect compliance track record because of the quality of our assessments.
Are you ready to see how a customer service skills test can make it easier for you to meet your business goals? Contact us to request a demo.