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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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!