How Not to Hire Customer Service People: Part 3 — Murky Research

Can scholarly research help us predict who should and should not be hired to a customer service position? Customer service research began in earnest as a reaction to Peters and Waterman’s 1982 best seller, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper Row). Veteran self-promoter, Tom Peters, said successful companies not only emphasized customer service, but they were obsessed by it. Although the book presented much anecdotal support, there was little hard evidence to back up their claims.

Out of more than 200 studies reviewed as preparation for this article, many of which contradicted each other, one un-ambiguous truth emerged. The best predictor of customer service performance depends entirely on the way performance is defined and how success is measured. In other words, nobody’s sure what makes someone do well in customer service. If a company thinks it’s what you know that determines good customer service and you rate as most successful those who know their products best and can create solutions, then cognitive ability and problem solving become highly predictive measures in those environments. If, on the other hand, your business measures good customer service as having less to do with information and focuses instead on interacting with people, then some aspects of personality show up in the studies as successful forecasting variables^[1] . What research seems to clearly demonstrate is the problem we have already identified in this series: what is the starting point for evaluating quality customer service?

In any research, the most important thing is the dependent variable; that is, what you are trying to predict. If a personality variable is used to define performance and then a personality test is given, you would expect the assessment to correlate with performance. The odd thing is that this correlation is so weak.

Most recent research of customer service and personality uses Costa & McCrae’s Big Five personality factors: Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness, and Neuroticism.^[2] Extraverted personality types do worse in customer service than more introverted individuals.^[3] . In a review of more than 13,000 subjects across studies from various vendors of service assessments, Frei and McDaniel found Agreeableness positively correlated with current customer service assessments (r=.61) along with Emotional Stability (r=.63). Frei and McDaniel™s findings of mean correlations of constructs with assessments (Hogan’s Service Orientation scale, PCI Customer Relations scale, PDI Customer Service Inventory, and Wonderlic Personnel Test) are summarized in Figure 1.^[4]

Figure 1

When researchers analyze customer service jobs, they tend to agree on four basic personality themes of successful CSRs; these are, friendliness, reliability, responsiveness, and courteousness.^[5] Reliability is an aspect of Conscientiousness and the other three are sub-sets of Agreeableness. What all of these variables have in common is relatively coherent, objective standards of definition; that is, they are easily associated with behaviors. Someone who is friendly smiles. The person who is courteous says please and thank you. The reliable individual shows up at work on time. Responsiveness can be objectively measured by the time it takes to do what a customer asks. The more cognitive (abstract and mental) the variable, the less useful it is in predicting performance^[6]

Getting Beyond Personality

Are there stronger correlations with performance than personality?
In a study of 190,156 fast food employees demographic variables (race, sex, and age) were more highly correlated with team performance than personality variables. Employee fit on a team appears to be strongly influenced by these demographic variables early on and contributes to a lot of turnover when new employees don’t match the age-race-sex composition of an existing team. Personality was completely irrelevant to predicting turnover.^[7]

Researchers at Oklahoma State University found that vocal attractiveness was the key element in predicting job performance of 154 customer service employees. If someone had a pleasing voice, they were more likely to be rated as highly effective.^[8]

Behavior-based Approach

What people do is more important for predicting job performance than what people know and what they think. Personality is only a useful selection construct when the personality variable is associated directly with objective measurable behavior. So why not skip the personality mumbo-jumbo and just assess behavior?

When we ask customer service supervisors what behaviors are most critical to successful job performance, they invariably respond with variants of friendliness, courteousness, responsiveness, and reliability. But when presented with a checklist of specific service behaviors, other competencies emerge that are rated as most important, such as Uses the telephone comfortably for long periods at a time or Takes direction from others.

My hypothesis is that most recruiters of customer service people rely heavily on personality myths rather than studying precisely what makes a good customer service rep in their organization. If it’s a matter of being friendly, reliable, courteous, and responsive, then service people should be great salespeople since these attributes define both professions. Then why do so many customer service people dislike selling and why do salespeople feel so unfulfilled in taking care of buyer requests?

There’s more to the story than personality and for that we turn to Barnett’s Four Levels of Service, a developmental model to explain the starting point for selecting customer service people and which also prescribes what comes second, third, and fourth in developing top-notch customer service people.

(To be continued)

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1 John Avis, Dissertation: An Examination of the Prediction of Overall, Task, and Contextual Performance, DAI, Section B, Vol.63(1-B), July 2002, pp.575.

2 Personality in Adulthood, 1991.

3 G.L. Stewart & K.P. Carson, Personality dimensions and domains of service performance, Journal of Business & Psychology, Vol. 9, pp.369-378.

4 R. Frei & M. McDaniel, Validity of Customer Service Measures in Personnel Selection, Human Performance, 1998

5 R. Frei & M. McDaniel, op. cit.

6 D. S. Ones & C. Viswesvaran, What do pre-employment customer service scales measure? 1996, cited by Frei & McDaniel, p.5

7 (Joshua Sacco, Dissertation: The relationship between team composition and team effectiveness, Michigan State U., June, 2003.).

8 (T. DeGroot & D. Kleumper, Evidence of Predictive and Incremental Validity of Personality Factors, Vocal Attractiveness, and the Situational Interview, International Journal of Selection & Assessment, Vol. 15, March, 2007, pp.30-39).

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