Does Your Contact Center Have Personality?

"Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are.”
-Miguel De Cervantes

It amazes me how often we focus on hiring for skills and experience forgetting that cultural fit is equally if not more important.

I recently visited with a client who relays calls for the hearing impaired and speech disabled. The Human Resources Director stated that “we don’t want people from the Verizon call center or any other sales environment.” He wasn't slamming Verizon Wireless or any other sales center but instead he was referring to the cultural fit. His best employees were those who focused on helping others instead of being highly competitive as you see in sales focused contact centers. This is important piece of understanding and crafting an accurate recruiting and hiring plan for your organization. For instance, in this case I would use a behavioral-based interview question that specifically highlighted the need for an empathic and helpful attitude.

• Rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how important helping others is to you?
(1 being not at all and 10 being very important)
• Provide me with a professional example of you helping others?
• What behaviors did you demonstrate? What was the outcome?

Of course you have to do much more than tailoring behavioral-based interview questions. Our comprehensive approach includes face-time with all stakeholders in the contact center with a strong focus on front line personnel, personality testing, cultural profile, and other unique tools.

As the Contact Center Practice Director for SOS Staffing Services I can speak to how important the right cultural fit is in hiring the right employee for our clients. In fact, we feel like this aspect is so important to hiring the right fit that over 50% of our discovery
process is spent on this aspect alone.

How do you find the right cultural fit? Are you using any type of personality test? If so, how much does the personality score alone factor into the hiring decision?

Until next time…talk don’t boil rice

Talk Don't Boil Rice

I am sad to say that I haven't posted anything in 10 months, which is quite sad.

so I am here to say that "talk don't boil rice", translation I set out to create a blog and I have been all talk. That being said I am recommitting to routinely posting new information.

a little more on talk don't boil rice. That is a saying I have plagiarized from someone at sometime and as my friends would say, it is a "solisism" or something that would only come out of my mouth. Which is not true of course but I have been known to use these good ole' sayings at opportune times. I promise more "solisisms" are on there way.

So stay tuned, same bat channel same bat time (not really).

Here we go!

Well, here we go....
This is my first attempt at truly engaging in the blog world. That being said I hope those of you who I have the pleasure of interacting with will be tolerant of my transgressions as I am certain there will be many :-).

A little information about me:
Active in contact center world for just over 12 years.
Held Director/Officer level positions at Overstock.com, CSFB & Bank One
Thus my expertise lies in the financial services and retail industries.
I am have just joined the staffing industry and I am learning as much as possible.

My roles have allowed me to gain experience and expertise in the following areas of contact centers: Credit Card, Mortgage, Collections, Fraud Prevention, Outsourcing, CRM sourcing and implementation, IVR sourcing and implementation, Fraud Application sourcing and implementation, multi-media channels, Knowledge base design and management, Training, Q/A, and WFM

My focus and what I believe is my "competitive advantage" is understanding the operations side of the business, inclusive of front end and back end service delivery involving different aspects of an organization such as logistics, marketing and finance.

Customer Care professionals have to establish themselves as competent tacticians and strategist with a strong business acumen in order to bring value to their organization and industry.

I hope to use this forum to exchange ideas and challenge popular contact center/customer sat notions in a collaborative form. As well as gather and evaluate industry leading trends.

Look forward to the Journey!

First Topic....Net Promoter Score, do you use it? How do you measure quality/customer sat?