Personality Testing to Build Highly Effective Call Centers

A contact center serves as the front line for business during many interactions with the client base. An excellent call center will convey warm, caring, positive feelings, along with the information the consumer needs. An ineffective call center leads to customer dissatisfaction, cancelations, poor reviews, and lost revenues.

Finding the right people takes a mix of compassion, intelligence, wit, and other traits to connect professionally with callers. Also, the environment and pace must match the agent personality or burnout. The typical interview helps uncover some of those traits, but it is hard to assess them all in a brief meeting. That is where personality testing can be a useful tool in the process.

Testing May Be the Key

A well-designed personality test provides insight into how the candidate thinks. It helps predict their response to situations. While personality testing does have a margin of error, it can help employers identify a candidate model for hiring. Over time, the test results provide useful information that can be used to improve coaching techniques and point to better ways to motivate employees. Improvement in these areas helps employees interact more naturally with callers.

Top Companies Already Use Personality Testing

According to a recent report by the BBC, 89 of the Fortune 100 companies use some form of personality testing as part of their application process. By far, the most popular of these exams is the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), but there are thousands of other personality tests on the market today. Many of them have preset for contact center assessment.

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Assessments help employees gain invaluable insights about how they interact with others. When properly coached, they improve communication skills and approaches with callers and coworkers. These tests provide the framework for creating and building better relationships, both in the office and with the customer.

Know What Personality Testing Can and Cannot Do

While these examinations are often referred to as “tests,” they are actually not testing anything. Rather, they serve to help determine one’s personality tendencies and beliefs. But, they can make mistakes. So companies should be careful in assessing their employment needs. Personality tests are but one tool for finding the right employee. People of many different personality types can learn to be effective as call center operators. The employer needs to learn how best to motivate and communicate with that personality. The key is in interpreting the results and adjusting the recruiting and training based on what you learn.

Every Call Center Should Use Personality Testing

Personality testing should be a part of a company’s hiring process for key positions, like the call center operator. Personality testing allows employers to identify ideal candidates while learning how to manage, motivate, and communicate with them. It can also help teach employees how to improve communication skills with callers based on their own personality traits. They can even learn how to identify key traits of others and adjust their response.

If you are considering such assessments or if you want to understand how to apply them to your center, call GCS. Our consulting team will be glad to discuss the best way to use them to grow your workforce and reduce costly turnover.

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