Rep Staff Personality Profiling / PMI's

[sky_lennard]

Hello,

I am a new manager for
an education company's small size call center, and I am researching the problems that I anticipate facing in the next few months as I shift the center's focus from 100% customer service (inbound), to 50% customer service and 50% sales (still all inbound).

Already I know that personality conflicts will probably be my #1 hurdle to overcome, so I am looking for some sort of survey-based questionnaire (either paper or online) that will help me identify personality challenge areas and strengths for my representatives. Since I'm new to this environment, I'd like a survey that measures customer service skills (like empathy, focus, vocabulary proficiencies, job match, customer service perspective, etc.) to assess the quality level of my current staff, and one that measures sales oriented skills (like persistance, sales drive, competitiveness, etc.) to determine how the staff will be able to adapt to the changes.

Does anyone know if there is a survey program that is built for this purpose (to aid in the transisiton from service toward sales), or has anyone gone through this before? Any horror and success stories would also be invaluable.

Thanks!!!

Nate Johnson
Teacher's Video Company
nwjohnson@globalvideollc.com

[sky_lennard]

I have done some more research now and I believe that I was incorrect in stating that "personality traits" are what I'm looking for -- really I'm trying to gauge how much training is necessary to introduce and implement a change in our environment from customer service to service/sales.

In doing this, I also would like to gauge how much resistance I will encounter from the representatives, and the easiest way that I could think of to do this is to survey them and get an idea where each person is coming from, both on an experience and interest level.

So in this sense, I don't think that "personality testing" is appropriate, but does anyone have a suggestion for what I can use?

Thanks so much!

-nate

[ctaylor]

Nate:
You have a major task ahead of you.

The first point I would make is that while there are a number of overlap between inbound service and inbound sales in terms of skill sets there is also a great deal ove difference. Trying to 'convert' your service team into a 'sales' team will be a challenge. In my experience you will face resistance from the floor, many people will hold the belief that service is the antithesis of sales. Plan to lose staff, some will opt out and some you will need to remove.

I suggest that personality tesing and skills mapping are both very worthwhile exercises for determining who can and cannot make the transition. For personality testing I have foound DISC to be one of the best when testing for sales suitability.

Of course your intial challenge will be to map out a communications startegy that is clear, to inform the agents; what you doing, why you are doing it, how it will be done and what will be required of them throughout this process.

I hope that I have added some value to this discussion. Please feel free to contact me directly if I can be of any further assistance at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com .

Colin

[sky_lennard]

Colin -- Thank you, I think that the DISC route may prove to be invaluable as I start on this venture. Do you (or anyone else) have any other suggestions for me; has anyone undergone this type of change before?

I do plan to keep the communication path very open and unrestricted, as I firmly believe that as a manager my job is to keep my employees completely informed throughout any change process. I also don't see how I could get them to buy into the change if they are not informed with all the whys, hows, etc. associated with it.

Any other ideas?

Thanks for all of your suggestions!! -- nate

[mikael]

Nathan,

It's been my experience across the years that Support & Service people generally tend to have strong "helper" motivations. They like to problem-solve, and they like being acknowledged for their assistance & expertise.

They also, as Colin notes, tend to resist the idea of getting involved in "sales." Perhaps this comes from having to clean up after overzealous sales folks in the past, perhaps it's just a stereotyped perception of the sales role -- but too many managers have reported problems in getting support folks to do sales for any of us to take the prospect of managing that change lightly.

What worked for me in a couple of projects was to talk about "counseling" and especially "advising" rather than "sales." I worked with the reps to help them to feel comfortable about "advising" callers about "useful options" that were in the callers' best interests to consider. I told the reps that they were not going to be measured on how many products and services they sold, but that what they needed to do was be sure that they had offered the caller information about all relevant opportunities and options.

You are indeed going to lose some people who simply cannot handle anything that in any way looks like selling. I suspect that you will find that such losses are not much of a loss, and if you handle folks carefully and work with them, you'll have fewer than you might fear of this class.

[sky_lennard]

Thank you, Mikael -- so you feel that the majority of managing this type of change effectively is presenting it to the representatives in a "support" role light, rather than identifying them as being in a "sales" role? I like the spin that puts on the concept, as that is mostly what we are trying to accomplish - simply upsells and cross sells on orders customers are placing.

I also do like the idea of providing profiling and skills mapping, as this could be an effective self-analysis tool to help the people who feel that they may not be "qualified" or have the aptitude to be a sales-oriented representative.

Does anyone have a company that you've used with success in the past or a website that offers these types of tests and services?

Thanks again!!

-nate

[mikael]

Nate,

"so you feel that the majority of managing this type of change effectively is presenting it to the representatives in a "support" role light, rather than identifying them as being in a "sales" role?"

Keep in mind that I'm pretty radical (grin) -- I think that the reason that the much-vaunted CRM industry has largely failed to deliver on its promises is that there are no designated Customer Relationship Managers.

Reposition the Sales guys as the Hunters. Reposition yourself and your team as the Farmers. Agrarian cultures tend to be far more successful than Hunter/Gatherer ones, for the simple reason that the food supply is much more steady in the former. That's the key -- become the attributed source for the stable income streams.

I think that the key to the Executive Suite for support folks is to set their sights on owning the ongoing customer relationship and being judged on customer retention rate and profitability. PFM ought to be our mantra: Power Follows Money. So long as you are seen as being about Break/Fix, I don't think there is any way to really win. When you make the jump to being about Farming/Relationship Management, and can run on a P&L basis, the doors start to open much wider.

As for personality profiling recommendations, I'd look for links in Sales magazines and discussion forums rather than here -- the Sales folks deal with such things much more often than the members here, in my view.

[sky_lennard]

Originally posted by mikael
...I'd look for links in Sales magazines and discussion forums rather than here -- the Sales folks deal with such things much more often than the members here, in my view.

Do you know of any off-hand that I could look into? I looked around the internet but didn't find anything with my preliminary search.

Thanks!

-nate

[mikael]

Nate,

I did a quick google search on "Sales professionals" and got a dozen or more pages of possible links. There's a national professional association, a careerjournal.com, what looked like a discussion board or two -- I suspect that you're likely to find some professional magazines in there as well, and in their advertising is where I'd bet you'll certainly find some testing services that offer pschological profiling tools/services.

Good luck,

[ctaylor]

Mikael raises some valid points. There are a number of options related to skills testing. "Seek and you shall find" - the google mantra. Or perhaps not....I have have tried 10 -15 different models and I keep coming back to to DISC ( no compensation paid, no special relationship), TRG is vendor agnostic. But Disc, regardless of who administers it tends to nail sales skills better than any other model I've tested.

Free advice is worth what you paid for it (grin), so take this with a grain of salt.

If I can be of further assistance pleae email me at ctaylor@thetaylorreachgroup.com .

Regards,

Colin

[Connie]

The DISC Profiling is a wonderful tool and I highly recommend you using it, our Firm currently profiles everyone that enters the door with it.

Another option is the Belbin test, don't know if you have heard of it, but it is awesome! Google it - do your research on it, if your interested in it I have an electronic copy I would be more than happy to forward to you. You can email me at: crice@deloitte.com

With a grin,
Connie Rice
Operations Manager