Here are several excerpts from What Makes a Good Call Center Agent?:
For everyone in call center management who regularly has the opportunity to walk the floor and scan the rows of faces, you’ve no doubt pondered the questions at the heart of employee retention: Why do certain call center agents excel in this environment while others fail? Why are some happy and others dissatisfied? How can some people thrive when others can’t keep pace?
Perhaps a bigger question is: How can you identify an individual’s potential before extending the offer?
Personality models can typically describe an individual’s dominant personality traits, which is helpful when you’re trying to improve collaboration among a group of people. However, current research confirms that no single personality type dictates success among call center agents.
So what makes a good call center agent? There are many complex explanations and models to address this question. In this article, Select International presents the answers compiled from many years of primary research and profiling agents in hundreds of call centers to collect over 2 million data points to date. It is from this data that the unique model for identifying Success Profiles of effective agents was created.
The Model
Four main factors influence whether individuals will become great call center agents. The more of these factors that are aligned and in play, the more likely the agent will be successful:
1.Competencies
2.Motivational Fit
3.Personality
4.External Factors
These factors and all of the issues they cover are like a Rubik’s cube, interrelated in numerous ways. But with the proper perspective and a framework for evaluating prospective employees, the puzzle becomes much easier to solve.
Select International’s research indicates that, while these are all important, the degree to which they affect an individual’s likelihood of success varies.
For a discussion of each of these factors and how they interrelate with each other, check out the source article.
