The Scenario
A call center is an operation where professional customer service agents handle phone calls from customers of various businesses. A contact center is a more sophisticated version of a call center. It’s an operation where agents communicate with customers through various multimedia including not only the telephone, but also the Internet, email, fax, and so on. The purpose of a call center could be to provide customer service, technical support for products, sales, collection of outstanding debt, or to provide advice. Inbound call centers only take incoming phone calls from customers—usually for customer service or support. Outbound call centers, on the other hand, allow a call center agent to contact a customer—usually to conduct a sales pitch or attempt to
collect outstanding debt.
Call centers are very demanding on their employees. This is a disciplined environment where precision control and perfectionism are expected. Call center agents are demanded to deliver perfect calls with every client. Not everyone has the behavioral makeup to handle working in a call center. Staff turnover is a serious problem.
A certain company in the financial industry runs a call center with 1,500-2,000 agents. The service provided by their call center agents ranges from inbound customer service in telephone banking, inbound service to assist customers that have a problem with Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) cards, and inbound assistance with regard to the company’s web site, as well as outbound calls selling loans, banking services, and so on. This call center provides a wide range of services.
In the call center industry there is a trend to treat call center agents as individuals who are capable of working in any type of call center. One often hears the saying, “A call center agent is a call center agent is a call center agent.” In other words, it’s assumed that you can use a standard profile to recruit any call center agent for any type of call center in any industry. Currently, call centers use a standard Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument to recruit call center staff.
This financial company made use of a staffing agency to provide them with call center staff. This staffing agency assessed all applicants with the Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument.
When Shadowmatch® was finally brought in to assist with the call center in question, they were battling an annual staff turnover percentage of close to 70%. This was a huge challenge and had a significant impact on the service provided to customers. This constant turnover of their trained, knowledgeable, and competent staff meant that they were continuously recruiting and training staff, only to lose them again within a year. Because of the high cost to train call center employees, if an employee leaves within the first 12-18 months, it’s a loss to the business. That employee hasn’t yet started to be productive in excess of his cost to the company. In other words, he has only been a cost; the company hasn’t yet reached the point of break-even on that employee in terms of costs incurred as a result of recruitment and salaries paid calculated against productivity.
Shadowmatch® was introduced to the top management team of the call center, and they immediately decided to start using this service for the recruitment of their staff. They identified the top performers in each specific job area and created almost 60 benchmarks (in Shadowmatch® these are referred to as “Shadows”)—one for each specific job area. Once all the Shadows were created, they started to match every applicant that was provided by the staffing agency to the benchmark profile of the top performers in each specific job function. Where the call center previously indiscriminately employed all candidates provided by the staffing agency, they now started to review potential candidates against the Shadowmatch® shadows, and only placed those candidates that were a good fit. The applicants that didn’t match were turned away and sent back to the agency.
Shadowmatch® immediately enabled this financial company to employ people that were a match to successful performers in one of the divisions. By having the luxury of almost 60 specific Shadows and not just one generic call center profile, they could now precision-place people in the team where they were best suited.
The process produced three distinct results:
1. It allowed the call center management to recruit and place people that had similar habits to the top performers in a specific area of business. This resulted in the new recruits quickly becoming top performers.
2. The ability to precision-place people shortened the training time. Because of the fact that the new employees already shared the habits of the top performers, they immediately fit the team and quickly learned the technical competencies and skills. Upon interviewing some of these new employees and questioning them about their early successes, they said: “These are my kind of people. I feel comfortable working in this environment and in this team.”
3. The call center was able to reduce the annual staff turnover by almost 50%. In a period of ten months, they reduced their staff turnover from 70% to 26%. The precision capabilities of Shadowmatch® immediately allowed them to retain their staff for a longer period.
Why is Shadowmatch® more effective than a Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument?
The Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument only measures the “people” aspects of a call center agent. The Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument has been developed to identify specific attributes that would be fit for any type of call center: People Positive Behavior, Altruism, Conflict Handling, and Team Inclination. But it doesn’t assess a lot of other important habits necessary to be successful at a particular call center job—for example Time Management, Conceptual Application, Resilience, Propensity to Own, and Propensity to Hand Off.
All call centers are not the same. Specialists distinguish between different levels of complexity in call centers. In some call centers the job is very linear. In other words, the call center agent needs to do very simple and straightforward things in order to provide good customer service. Example: Give a customer a balance on his account.
In other call centers, the job is more lateral. A call center agent might need to take an action in order to provide service to the customer. Example: Transfer funds from one account to another account.
A third type of call center, in terms of complexity, is a conceptual call center. In this type of call center, the service agent needs to interpret what the client says, provide advice, and then take action in order to provide customer service. Example: Give a customer investment advice on money that he has inherited, and then take action in placing the necessary investments. By taking the above facts into consideration, one can understand that a generic approach toward assessing whether someone is suited for a call center environment would not work. First, because no call center environment is the same, and second, because besides the different complexity levels, one also needs to remember that each call center has a different culture, leadership style, and level of technology
sophistication. It is therefore important to take both a holistic and specific approach when assessing whether an individual would be suited for a specific job in a specific call center.
Shadowmatch® currently provides the only successful answer. Shadowmatch® takes each job and the applicant—as well as the environment or context (which includes culture, leadership style, all the different aspects of the working environment, the team
dynamics, etc.)—into consideration when mapping the habits of the successful performers, in order to draw a map of what is necessary to be successful in that specific job.
In one of the call centers where we mapped the habits of the top performers, the following results came out as important habits to be successful in the job:
- Propensity to hand off This was very interesting, as we usually assume that a successful call center agent needs to have a habit of taking ownership. In this call center one of the most critical habits was the propensity to hand off.
- The habit of discipline This refers to the habit of working in an environment that is regulated by policies,procedures, rules, and regulations.
- The inclination toward teamwork
- The ability to work positively with other people
- The ability to handle conflict
- The ability to work in a routine environment
- The ability to apply one’s conceptual ability 30% The top performers scored 3/10 for conceptual
questions. This is an important indicator. Anyone scoring way less or way more would not be successful in this job.
In addition:
- The top performers completed the Shadowmatch® worksheet in an average time of 46 minutes and 40seconds.
- The top performers also indicated that their dominant approach to their world was one of being involved. They had a tendency to read situations and be un-aggressively involved when necessary, and aggressively involved when the situation asked for it. All staff appointed in this call center were assessed by the Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument.
They all showed a strong inclination to be positive toward people, had a strong team inclination, and most of them also had a propensity toward taking ownership. (Although, interestingly, it’s important to remember that the top performers showed a habit of handing things off!) We assessed a fair sample of staff through Shadowmatch® in order to draw a proper comparison as to who would really be successful in this call center.
The following became clear through the Shadowmatch® results:
- The call center agents’ habits ranged from taking ownership to being able to hand things off.
- The conceptual application ranged from a score of 0/10 through to 7/10.
- Some of the staff displayed a very defined habit of solving problems as well as a very deeply embedded habit of acting immediately and quickly (responsiveness). But the shadow of the top performers indicated that these were not important habits toward success in this call center.
- Top performers completed the worksheet much quicker than the shadow performers. The top performers completed the Shadowmatch® worksheet in an average time of 46 minutes and 40 seconds.
The time it took the other call center agents to complete the worksheet ranged from 35 minutes and 26 seconds (shortest) to 106 minutes and 45 seconds (longest).
- The agents’ attitude (approach to their world) was very diverse. Some staff displayed an attitude of being dominantly uninvolved, but the top performers displayed an attitude of being dominantly involved and unaggressive.
We asked the management team to jot down the names of the average to poor performers. We used Shadowmatch® to rank the staff from the best match to the shadow right through to the poorest match. It turned out that only 8 of the 32 staff were really a match to the top performers. According to Shadowmatch®, more than 15 of these staff members would not be successful in this specific call center. Upon checking with the management, the names of the average and poor performers that they had jotted down were, with the exception of one name, exactly the same as the poor matches on Shadowmatch®. We also learned that some of the staff that proved a poor match to the shadow had already resigned within their first month of employment.
Keep in mind that all these staff members had been successfully assessed by the Generic Call Centre Assessment Instrument and employed with a prediction to be successful in the call center.
Conclusion
Through this exercise it became clear that one cannot recruit successfully by means of a generic assessment. The assessment used must be specific to the job and the environment. The top performers in an environment need to indicate which habits are necessary to be successful in a specific job. This is the very reason why Shadowmatch® has again and again proven to be the best way to precision-employ and precision-develop people.