De-Linking Call Center Performance and Turnover

Do these positions require the educational credentials that justify higher salaries and at least some element of job security? No.

Is it necessary to have substantial experience in the field prior to being hired? No.

Are there reasonable expectations for advancement and/or development opportunities? No.

Do these jobs connote personal success or higher social status? Again, for the most part, no.

So, why do people take these transactional jobs at all? They need a job that does not require experience or a more advanced education. Stated slightly differently,people work in call centers for reasons of expediency rather than preference. These jobs are way stations and rarely places where people choose to settle.

Are call center jobs unique with respect to structural problems? Not really. There are other jobs with many or all of these limitations, and they are virtually all in different areas of sales. One of the most obvious is automobile sales, where high turnover is such a chronic problem that many dealerships screen in a perfunctory way, settling for someone presentable who can at least temporarily fill a hole.

Stay Targeted on What You Can Change

For call center operators, the pragmatic course of action is to accept the reality of a higher base level of turnover and to focus on the performance variables they can control. Just as every economics student learns about the “guns and butter” model for deciding how to allocate resources, call center operators need to apply a similar model to job performance and employee turnover to determine an optimal balance between sales results and turnover costs.

Higher sales performance generally involves higher turnover costs, because hiring people with strong sales talents means hiring people who get quickly bored and/or frustrated with the call center conditions and leave, or who quickly realize how good they are at selling and depart voluntarily for more fulfilling jobs. The reverse is also true, in that lowering the performance bar means that even those with minimal sales ability can meet the standards and may hang onto their jobs for as long as they can.

As with so much else in life, decisions need to be made about what your organization values most. If you seek higher results, you have to factor in higher turnover with its elevated costs. Alternatively, if you want lower turnover, then you have to accept the top-line hit.

I have never encountered a company who willingly chose the latter option, so for the rest of this article we’ll focus on the most significant turnover variable you cancontrol, which is the quality of people you hire. Hiring people who not only can do the job, but who will do the job can make a substantial dent in turnover and all the associated costs.

The Devil is in The Details

My firm has worked in the field of psychometrics for over 40 years. During that period, we have conducted numerous studies and statistical analyses, which have been reinforced through a great many observations about call center jobs and the people who work in them. We have developed a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and it’s some of those insights I want to pass along to you here.

In figuring out why people are successful or why they are not, one of the most notable concepts we work with is the Law of Small Differences. The law says that very small, even minute differences in inputs can generate significant variances in outputs. As a simple example, drawing from the world of sports, in a World Cup downhill ski race the top 10 might all finish within 2 seconds of one another after covering several miles of terrain at speeds sometimes exceeding 100 miles per hour. In the field of behavioral assessment we similarly find that the behaviors and motivational needs that differentiate top performers from those at the middle of the pack or below are often only a matter of degree. Differences this small are not visible or measurable in interviews, so using a psychometric that can calibrate very minor differences in traits is fundamental to the points that follow.

What Traits and Behaviors Drive High Performance?

The first thing to understand is that call center outbound sales people are not simply outside or field sales people brought indoors. They may have some overlapping motivating needs and similar traits, but they can’t be seamlessly transposed to each other’s environment. Someone who has been genuinely successful in outside sales would find call center conditions too constraining, too routine and unchanging, and the nature of buyer relationships too impersonal. What we have also found is that outside sales people are more pronounced in their behaviors with more colorful, and sometimes even more charismatic personalities. In comparison, the attributes that contribute to higher performance in call centers are more subdued degrees of achievement orientation, sociability, and ambition.

On the matter of ambition, it is less of a contributor to call center success than it is with external sales performance. Whereas what we could call “hunger to make sales” is the most critical motivating need found in highly-performing outside sales people, call center top performers are more motivated by initiating new relationships, influencing others, and enhancing their self esteem through successful sales interactions. The corollary of this is that management practices for coaching, communicating, and “motivating” each of these two personalities will also need to be somewhat different.

Take Motivation and Talents into Account in Your Job Design

An important job design consideration is to avoid building both sales and customer service expectations into the same job. A job should have a clear orientation – either service or sales. This is simply an issue of personal motivation: people who are attentive to the needs of others and who are motivated by a need to help others are propelled by their personal need for external approval. Fearing rejection, they like to do the right things and they want to recognized and appreciated for that. In contrast, sales people are motivated by their internal need to accomplish what they want to do, even if it involves disapproval and frequent rejection. A transactional sales personality is not motivated by a desire to help others, so expecting them to assume that role is misusing their talents. Similarly, expecting the service personality to risk rejection by asking a closing question creates both stress and discomfort, and encourages avoidance behaviors. Either way, there’s no win, and you have to be able to differentiate these two personalities to properly place them.

Even with jobs that have a clear sales focus, there are no stereotypes, and it’s dangerous and potentially costly to make assumptions. Context – identifying all the variables that account for the uniqueness of each situation – needs to be understood and translated into specific success behaviors. For example, it’s popularly assumed that those who sell for a living must be extroverted to some extent, but that’s a myth. In some outbound sales roles where the buyers tend to be more technically oriented, analytical, and more direct in their communication, sales people with similar characteristics relate better than do their more sociable counterparts who may be perceived as superficial.

Context needs to be considered even within the same call center operation: repeatedly we have uncovered subtle behavioral and talent differences among the various sales roles, primarily due to what is being sold to whom, and how the selling process is managed and scripted. The lesson is that one size does not fit all, and each sales job has to be looked at individually, with specific behaviors identified that support the selling model within that unique set of circumstances. This is the degree of precision necessary to achieve higher sales with lower turnover.

Two other behavioral considerations are notable based upon our sales force analyses: innovation and originality of thinking, and what we call “Emotional Containment,” which means the degree of emotion that people display in their interactions with others. Again, what is required in each of these areas is a function of context. Normally, despite the myth that creativity is an asset in every job, the highest performers in sales call centers score low in measures of original thinking and innovation. The reason for this is that they follow the script and don’t feel a compulsion to out-think the guidance that the company has struggled so hard to learn and finesse. In contrast to external consultative sales jobs that entail a lot of problem identification and analysis, call centers are not for highly creative, radical thinkers who believe they know all the answers.

Our measure of Emotional Containment is another performance-determining variable, which many responsible for sales hiring completely overlook. What we have discovered through our analyses is that personalities who exhibit greater emotional control and attempt to be logical and rational in their interpersonal communication work best in the inbound roles, particularly customer service and help desks, where their more careful communication style connotes higher professionalism and credibility. In comparison, outbound sales roles require the seller to be more open and self-divulging, with the ability to establish an emotional wavelength right out of the box. Their responses need to be more flexible and they have to adapt to buyers based only upon what they hear. In this role, some degree of spontaneity is essential, so slower-to-react, more inflexible styles struggle at building relationships.

Get the Job Right!

In summary, the overriding message with call center hiring is get the job right. Don’t fall prey to stereotypes and popular notions about sales behaviors, and like the physician who performs multiple tests to be certain of a conclusion, invest the time it takes to identify the subtle factors that influence both performance and job fit. If you understand what behaviors deliver consistently successful performance in each job, your hiring becomes easier, faster, and more certain of success.

For more than forty years, Frank Gump has been helping corporations become more productive and profitable by helping management teams identify and hire top performers and manage them most effectively. Developed and refined through extensive experience in more than 1200 organizations in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia, ADGI’s Organizational Management System (OMS) is a finely calibrated, technologically advanced decision-making process offering the potential for enormous payback. Contact ADGI for more insight and connect with Frank on LinkedIn. Follow ADGI on Twitter @ADGIGroup. Like ADGI on Facebook and follow us on Google+.