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Get the Most Out of Working Relationships How Staffing Services Help -- We bridge the gap between hiring and operations by examining how staffing agencies can help you find and retain the kind of agents whom you'll be proud to have serve as the voice of your company.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Allan Rosenberg

Here at Call Center Magazine, we're on a year long quest to help you most efficiently and effectively find and develop the kind of agents you need. And, oftentimes, call centers turn to staffing agencies to aid them with the "finding" part.

But just as you would not think of casually hiring your workforce without screening, and you would never consider leaving your agents unsupervised, so you should put appropriate thought and diligence into the selection and ongoing relationship with a firm that is going to be selecting and helping to develop dozens or hundreds or thousands of agents on your behalf.

Staffing agencies often offer several different services for call centers, which generally fall into the following categories that we outline below:

Flexstaffing. The "bread and butter" service that most staffing firms offer is providing temporary employees. Staffing through a temp agency enables you to ramp up your operations rapidly to meet seasonal needs, handle short-term sales promotions, and deal with unexpected increases in call volume. You can also scale back without incurring the costs and the morale-depleting effects associated with laying off permanent employees.

Bringing agents into temp-to-perm positions is an excellent way for you to test the skills of prospective employees and since a temp agency handles the administrative work relating to a temp's employment, it frees your company to concentrate on what you do best. Temps also help you get around headcount constraints imposed by senior management and they often cost less per hour than do permanent employees, particularly when you consider the cost of employee benefits.

But, of course, flexstaffing has its pitfalls, too. One of the main being that temps are more likely to walk away from the job than are your permanent employees, which can both disrupt your operations and reduce your return on investment in agent training. Turnover is of special concern if your company needs to train agents extensively in unique procedures, so temps often fit best in the lower service tiers. But since they have fewer...