"A prudent
question is one-half of wisdom."
~ Sir Francis Bacon
WE
ALL RUN CALL CENTERS – CUSTOMER SERVICE ISSUES
To some extent most businesses function as customer service call
centers. Where else will customers go
for service when face-to-face contact is not feasible?
The success
or failure of customer service delivery in any size organization
depends on people. All of the information technology and all of
the rigorous procedures in the world cannot convince callers that
someone genuinely cares about their issues and concerns.
Statistics
concerning customers who change from established business relationships
to new ones are startling. 67% of customers who started new business
relationships report that they were “satisfied” with
their old ones. 85% of all “satisfied” customers indicate
that they would be willing to try a new supplier. Why would satisfied
customers leave?
In a majority
of cases it is because at least once, they have experienced poor
customer service. As businesses grow and customer bases expand,
we face constant erosion in the personal relationships that form
the foundation for customer loyalty. Where the business has grown
to the point of instituting a call center, the chances are minimal
that any customer will speak to the same representative more than
once in the lifetime of the business relationship. Given the trend
toward facelessness, the only real hope of conveying trust, empathy,
courtesy and concern for the needs of customers lies in finding
employees who consistently exhibit those characteristics themselves.
Employees
must also be able to communicate verbal and numerical concepts
effectively with customers. In addition, they must understand
and espouse the company’s customer service philosophy and
culture, and deliver services within those parameters.
To precisely
assess these characteristics, Profiles International has developed
the Customer Service Perspective™. If your organization
depends on a quality level of customer service, begin by hiring
individuals who have the “right stuff,” i.e., the
traits, skills, and understanding necessary for them to be top
performers in your organization’s environment. By combining
an assessment instrument that incorporates the well-established
concept of “job fit” with a tool designed to measure
an employee’s alignment with your company’s customer
service philosophy, you increase the chances that new employees
will deliver the levels of customer service you strive to achieve.
At the same time, existing employees can be assessed and coached
to ensure that the entire team is focused on exemplary levels
of customer service. You will immediately and dramatically increase
in your employees the level of awareness and level of service
necessary to reap the benefits of customer loyalty.
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CALL
CENTER SCAMS: WARNING
A recent Google Internet search took 0.4 seconds
to return about 4 million hits on the words “call center
scams”.
Wipro
Spectramind learned the hard way that employees with less than
ideal levels of integrity devised illegal schemes to make extra
money at the company’s customer service facilities. The
lesson is clear and extends across industries and geographical
locations. It is much less expensive to conduct pre-hire integrity
and reliability screening of prospective employees than it is
to suffer the consequences post-hire!
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THE
HR DILEMMA: HOW CAN I BE STRATEGIC, IF I NEED TO PROCESS ALL THESE
TRANSACTIONS?
HR Departments in most companies have been hard
hit due to the economy driven cutbacks of the past few years.
An eight person HR staff in an 850-employee company may have been
pared back to one or two employees, while the single HR person
in a 100-employee business may have vanished altogether. Yet another
scenario is where HR departments have been disbanded, and the
HR job functions are assigned to other positions within the organization.
Effects
of these cutbacks may not be readily apparent. One symptom, however,
is immediately evident - the surviving HR employees are overloaded.
They are overwhelmed with transactions including reviewing applications,
conducting interviews, addressing employee complaints, and preparing
paperwork for benefits enrollment. The list is endless! Transaction
processing always seems to rise to the top of the priorities list
as most are time-critical. The failure to meet deadlines can detrimentally
affect employees and financially impact an organization.
Many
times, strategic initiatives like designing a more efficient and
cost effective hiring system, developing employees’ leadership
and management skills, and tracking and improving performance
and productivity are delayed. The immediate effects and costs
associated with the delay of strategic initiates are not obvious.
Over time, however, the lost opportunities will impact the bottom
line. A balance between processing necessary transactions and
the development of strategic initiatives will pay huge dividends
in the long run and impact long-term viability of an organization.
Businesses will be healthier and more profitable in an increasingly
competitive world.
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REDUCING
THE INTERVIEW WORKLOAD
Traditional hiring systems (application, interview, reference
checks, selection) are notoriously ineffective in producing quality
hires. Not as obvious is the amount of valuable time and productive
energy that is wasted on outdated hiring systems. A recent survey
of over 100 businesses recently produced enlightening results.
Each new hire required interviewing between three and ten candidates,
the number of interviews per candidate varied from one to four,
and each interview required from one to four managers’ participation.
Choosing
low to mid-range numbers from each of these responses (5 candidates,
2 interviews, 2 managers per interview), and assuming that a minimum
of 30 minutes is consumed in preparing, scheduling, and performing
each interview, an astounding ten hours is consumed in a single
selection! Considering the additional amount of time expended
in reviewing résumés, checking references, and verifying
past employment, it’s probably safe to say that the process
cost the organization a minimum of $500 while preventing several
valuable employees from engaging in more productive tasks. If
that number does not get your attention, consider that researchers
say traditional hiring processes have only a one in eight chance
(12.5%) of producing a top performer that will still be with the
organization a year after hire.
Compare
that system with a strategic hiring system that incorporates assessments
designed to increase the quality and quantity of information available
to decision makers. Assuming that there are enough applications,
and that the organization does not use the “fog the mirror”
selection method, a choice may be made not to interview the bottom
third (or half, or two-thirds) of the applicants. Richer interviews
will result by using the assessment information in concert with
the traditional sources of information (application, reference
checks, etc.). Using all of these resources, research indicates
that the odds of obtaining that elusive top performer who will
stay with the organization long enough to turn a profit increase
to three out of four (75%). Managers are able to reclaim about
half of that wasted time! In a recent demonstration of a strategic
hiring system based on the ProfileXT™, an organization was
able to expand its sales force by 40 representatives in less than
60 days in order to take advantage of the release of a new product.
Nine months later, 86% of the new hires are still employed with
the company, and 81% of those still selling are producing at greater
than 100% of their sales quota! (Full case study to follow in
another issue – watch for it!)
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PROGRESSIVE
IMPROVEMENT IN HIRING SUCCESS – LEARNING TO DO IT BETTER!
A medium-sized hotel sits of the banks of a beautiful river in
a metropolitan area of about 250,000 people. It has earned the
reputation as a leader in its market for over 15 years. The hotel
houses a fine dining restaurant and extensive meeting and banquet
facilities. It enjoys a good relationship with the nearby university
and major local manufacturers who regularly lodge their clients
and guests and hold their meetings at the hotel.
Unfortunately,
the people side of the operation was a bit more troublesome than
was apparent to the casual observer. The new hire – failure
rate exceeded 85%, with 74% of those new hires failing in less
than six months. In fact, 50% left voluntarily or were fired within
the first 60 days.
Early
in 2002, management at the hotel began using the Step One Survey™
in their hiring process. Management used the SOS reports to guide
the interview process and used assessment scores as a guide for
hiring decisions. Occasionally the hiring team occasionally decided
to hire individuals whose patterns of scores were in the low range,
when offset by a good reference from a previous employer, or a
personal relationship with a hotel employee. This process resulted
in a reduction in the new hire – failure rate to 62%, while
the rate of six-month failures dropped to 50%. While the reduction
was certainly a positive effect, and the cost-benefit ratio was
a favorable number, the hotel felt that continued improvement
was possible with a more systematic approach, and their Profiles
representative agreed. The data from the first year was analyzed,
and criteria for hiring was established based on the data. In
order to be considered for hire, an applicant could not have a
distortion score below four, or any two scale scores below four.
History evidenced that applicants that fell below the criteria
were 40% more likely to fail than applicants above that level.
The graph
below illustrates the outcome. When the criteria scoring approach
was combined with the SOS interview tools, the hotel reduced new
hire failures to 26% (well below the industry average), with virtually
all of the failures occurring in the first six months of employment.
An analysis of the new data illustrated that another adjustment
of the criteria could be accomplished within the limits of the
applicant pool and still allow the hotel to fill jobs as necessary.
This new criteria (no single score below four) is expected to
further reduce the new hire – failure rate to about 19%.
Cost-benefit ratios for the assessment program are now about 1:38,
and improving!
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