How 5CA Streamlines Hiring of Multilingual Customer Service Agents, with Pipplet

Working from home has become a truly mainstream phenomenon since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, 5CA has been ahead of the game here with over 15 years of experience, as one of the world leaders for remote customer service outsourcing. Their mission: providing work-from-home CX (Customer experience) agents in 70+ languages, to serve a wide range of clients with a specific focus on the gaming, e-commerce and tech industries. 

With their tried-and-tested remote operations model, 5CA is adept at sourcing and deploying the best multilingual talent, without being limited by geography. With this winning formula, it is no surprise that 5CA has experienced such spectacular growth in the last 2 years. 

In this article, Levi Donaire, recruitment manager at 5CA, shares how the company has successfully found ways of streamlining its recruitment process, thanks to Pipplet.

Key Figures:

• created in 1998
• employees: over 1,000
• nearly 15,000 candidates assessed with Pipplet in 25+ languages

The Need to Level Up 5CA's Recruitment Game to Recruit the Best Multilingual Customer Service Agents

The increased acceptance of remote working by employers as well as the explosive growth in the gaming and e-commerce sectors has meant that 5CA’s business has grown tremendously, with the company taking on one major client per month, and offering 100 position openings at any given time. 

From its origins, 5CA’s staff operate in several languages:

• High volume languages such as English and Spanish, where there are a lot of applications to sift through,
• Low volume languages such as German and Japanese, where native speakers are harder to come by. 

Before 2019, 5CA had an established approach to assessing the language abilities of potential candidates. As a recruitment manager, Levi recalls : 

'At 5CA, we have always had a very international team. This meant we had native speakers for every language we'd recruit agents for. Although they weren't necessarily HR people but operational staff and quality assurance people, they did have the knowledge to assess language skills."

However, as 5CA's client base started to grow exponentially and the volume of candidates they needed to assess increased, the company realized there was a need to rethink processes.

“The old way of doing things worked, but it wasn't certified, whereas using a professional third-party service would ensure more objective recruitment”, Levi remembers. 

“Pipplet was that solution, and its major drawcard was the use of the CEFR framework which would offer greater legitimacy and allow us to standardize our recruitment expectations. At the end of the day, we realized our old approach was not only too subjective at times but also too time-consuming”, Levi explained.

Making Recruitment More Time-Efficient 

When you ask Levi about the biggest benefit of Pipplet for 5CA, she doesn’t hesitate long: recruitment time-efficiency. Although internal staff could still assess more accurately certain nuances, she notes that Pipplet assessment has guaranteed a high level of accuracy without compromising on quality. 

Levi elaborates on this point: ‘’There are only around 5% of Pipplet assessments that we prefer to have a second check done. But even when double checks are required, Pipplet is more time-efficient than our previous approach”. 

When she’s asked to quantify how much time recruiters have saved since the introduction of Pipplet, Levi estimates that each recruiter in the company saves on average 24 hours each week. In other words, it’s more than a half-time job saved per recruiter!

Enhancing the Candidate Experience

Levi mentions that, since 5CA incorporated Pipplet, there are also benefits for the candidates themselves:

“Using Pipplet has helped improve the candidate experience. The interface is very clear and easy to use. And the communication between our recruitment team and potential candidates has been streamlined.” 

“As we pave the way for Pipplet's integration into a new recruiting system, we are looking forward to making communication even smoother”

Improving Customer Satisfaction

Since the adoption of Pipplet, the HR team at 5CA also noticed positive feedback from 5CA's customers. 

While Levi reported having to manage some clients' expectations in terms of language skills, having run some tests using native language speakers of their own, they reported being very impressed with Pipplet as a recruitment solution.

“Our clients sometimes struggle to understand how Pipplet works. However, once we explain and allow them to run their own tests, they realize the value of this assessment. The team at Pipplet have been great at listening to our customer requests and feedback, and promptly implementing innovations. Our client experience has been excellent so far. 

When looking to the future, we hope to use Pipplet to assess skills beyond language abilities, like typing speed.” 

The Growing Importance of Pipplet in 5CA’s Hiring Process

In 2019, 5CA integrated Pipplet into their recruitment process as a way of streamlining their approach and ensuring that they could find the best talent fast. At that time, Pipplet was only introduced at a later stage of the recruitment process after the candidate had applied, completed an initial assessment and been called for an interview. 

However, by 2021 5CA's recruitment team realized that having a candidate fail the Pipplet assessment after having gone through three other stages was a waste of time. 

They, therefore, decided that it made more sense to have Pipplet as the first and only assessment for scarce languages. 

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Pipplet's Take on 5CA's Recruitment Challenges

Recruiting multilingual customer service agents has become an increasing necessity for companies that work globally, such as the prestigious brands that work with 5CA (Rovio, Epic Games, RK Games, Bang & Olufsen, Recharge.com…). 

While assessing a candidate's language skills during the recruitment process can be pretty time-consuming for recruiters, Pipplet offers the potential to save precious time for them, with a high level of accuracy, as is demonstrated in the case of 5CA. 

Thanks to the adoption of Pipplet, 5CA has been able to streamline and speed up their recruitment process, as well as improve experiences for their customers and the candidates themselves. 

Want to take your hiring process to new heights through the integration of Pipplet? Our team can definitely help! Get in touch with us today.

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