How Not to Hire Customer Service People: Part 2
The Starting Point
Dr. David K. Barnett
So, if satisfied customers can’t or won’t tell us what’s required for outstanding customer service, who do we turn to? What’s the proper starting point for evaluating people for customer service positions?
A Case Study in Congeniality
Let me use The National Institutes of Health as a brief case study here. NIH publishes its competencies for exceptional customer service as follows:
Promotes courtesy to customers through the use of verbal amenities.
Promptly answers telephone with identification of self and service.
Demonstrates active listening by acknowledging and clarifying verbal messages to ensure mutual understanding.
Seeks information to better understand customer needs and requests.
Proactively keeps customers informed by giving timely and appropriate feedback.
Assesses problem situations and initiates effective service interventions that result in customer satisfaction
(i.e., informs patients about delays).
Diffuses sensitive or difficult customer situations and creates a climate for mutual problem solving.
Explores ways of accommodating different customer requests, cultural practices, and age progression in order to provide sensitive customer service.
Demonstrates through daily interactions that all individuals in the CC are our customers.
Coordinates role with staff in other departments in order to effectively meet customer service needs. [1]
NIH apparently uses these aptitudes as the starting point for hiring and evaluating current employees. The items in this list are typical of competency lists drawn up by many companies and consultants. You may notice that every item is customer-focused. The assumption seems to be: how a customer service person communicates with customers is the most important attribute of all. However, this is not the correct starting point for understanding customer service competencies.
The same mistake is made by many sales recruiters who act as if the only critical selection criterion for sales candidates is their ability to communicate effectively with customers. Uncover needs and solve problems. But effective communication, while certainly important, is not the starting point for hiring salespeople or customer service reps. Other competencies come first.
In sales it’s easy to see the logic. Communication skills are meaningless if the salesperson doesn’t have anyone to talk to. Some competencies have priority over communication and logically are more mission critical. If a salesperson can’t get in front of enough people it doesn’t matter how sensitive he is to people’s needs or how well she can solve problems. Obviously, the ability to initiate contacts is not the key behavior for inbound customer service people. So what comes first?
Great Interviews Don't Make Great Employees
It may sound like an oxymoron, but the jumping off point for customer service selection isn't the customer at all. When communication style and personality are made the primary selection criteria, hiring customer service people is surely one of the most esoteric and irrational business decisions made by sane businesspeople.
"We’re looking for people who like people,” says Bonnie, a bubbly supervisor in a financial services call center. “When I’m interviewing a candidate, I put myself in the role of one of our customers. I picture myself with a problem and ask myself, “how would I feel talking with this person?’ Does she listen? Does he make me feel good?”
Besides being completely subjective, the focus of this approach is completely misplaced. It’s all about how Bonnie feels. Whatever objective criteria might be articulated by the HR department is completely ignored by Bonnie’s quest for the pleasing personality. Congeniality is fine for beauty pageants, but things can turn ugly for businesses that rely too heavily on amiability as a criterion for filling customer service positions.
Take XYZ Services, for example, (names have been changed to protect client confidentiality) a company that uses the customer congeniality template to hire workers for its national call center. Based on a recent internal memo, XYZ sends high fives to its recruiters when only 25% of its service new hires quit or were fired within the first ten weeks of employment. A 25% failure rate must be an improvement!
This bad habit of hiring smiling, cheery-faced extroverts is costing XYZ about $15,000 per person just in lost compensation, not counting selection costs, the cost of 3-4 weeks of training, housing and transportation costs to get 30-40 people to national headquarters, and lost opportunity costs. A bad customer service hire could easily cost XYZ $25 - $40K. Multiply that by the number of new hires from the last class that said adios or were canned, and you begin to see the huge implications of starting at the wrong place when you hire customer service people.
Customer Service Terminations
Most candidates know how to create a positive impression in job interviews. It's a little like two people preparing to go on a date. Each dresses up and is on their best behavior. The recruiter wants to impress the applicant just as much as the applicant wants to make a positive first impression. But after the job offer is accepted and these two are "married," things change. What happened to all those “nice” happy interviewees once they got the job? Some didn’t want to work long hours. Others get bored talking on the phone about the same things over and over. Still others didn’t like the company telling them to finish calls quickly and move to the next. Not a few disliked being told what to do and blew up at a manager or trainer rather than submit to authority.
In an unscientific poll of a number of my clients, the number one cause for termination of customer service people is poor schedule management; that is, coming in late, leaving early, taking too many breaks, and absenteeism. A lot of people decide to leave on their own to find work that pays better or is more interesting.
Using the NIH competency list would have uncovered few if any of these problems. Oh sure, item number 9 references service to “internal customers” of supervisors and members of other departments, but it’s there almost an afterthought. In every case of a terminated or departed customer service rep, they were congenial people when they had something to gain. They persuaded a recruiter or manager that they would treat the company’s customers just like they treated their internal customers. Thankfully, they didn’t last long enough to do exactly that.
So, if customer communication is not the critical element in customer service selection, what is?
(To be continued...)
[1] Office of Human Resources Management, NIH.gov
