With the advent of PeopleMaps accurate and low cost psychometric testing delivered instantly online, one of the most personality-centric industries, Contact Centres, is now adopting it to screen the hundreds of thousands of applicants it processes each year.
The latest innovations in personality ‘benchmarking’ also allows recruiters to know what they are looking for by way of personality ‘Type’ and low cost volume testing means that they can assess every candidate against this at the time of application. However, there is a potential pitfall. Get the initial benchmark wrong and you won’t solve the problem you’re trying to tackle but may aggravate or even create another.
It is essential that when establishing the benchmark you know exactly what problem you are looking to solve.
All problems in a business are related. Nothing in any organisation acts in isolation and everything experiences; ‘effect – cause – effect’. Here is a list of problems you might be trying to deal with:
- My sales are too low
- My staff training and replacement costs are too high
- My client satisfaction score is too low
- My staff turnover is too high
- My staff performance is too low
- I have too many customer complaints which is upsetting my client
- I am losing client’s because we are not performing to our Service Level Agreements
When faced with new candidates who are you going to hire?
You can use personality profiling to help with all of these issues however you have to decide which problem you are working on as you really can only tackle one at a time. For instance, if you say you want to hire high performing sales people and reduce your staff turnover you’re already hitting an issue. From a personality perspective and as a broad generalisation, a contact centre environment is not conducive to natural high performance sales people, so they soon get bored and leave.
Hiring only sales focussed types would be likely to aggravate your staff churn problem, not reduce it and the potential knock-on effects that result are enormous.
With high staff turnover you will be training a lot of people only to see them walk out the door. At the recent Customer Contact Association annual conference a room full of Contact Centre Managers proposed that it costs £16,000 per head when someone leaves prematurely, and that’s before you factor in the invisible cost of upset clients and loss of earnings. So if you lose 100 people prematurely that’s a cost to your business of £1.6m. Ouch!
So where do you start? Well if you can reduce your staff turnover then at least you know your training will not be wasted. An average sales person can actually improve their results with the right training but they need to stay around long enough for you to have any influence on their performance.
If properly identified, there are personalities that may start slowly, yet consistently perform better month on month. They will absorb the training, and because of their personality type are content in a stable role. A modest investment in identifying these people to improve performance could save a big chunk of that £1.6M.
