The ideal Customer Care Agent Profile

Have you also heard that the ideal Customer Care candidates profile should read something like this:
"Not too young, woman is preferred as we all think women are better at caring, children are good (as long as they are in school) - basically somebody who is happy to have a 9-5 job (or whatever the hours), who is happy to have a job they can combine with Family life (meaning: forget when they go home) and have no major aspirations to grow in the company".

I lead a multinational Customer Care organisation in Europe where we price ourselves on having native speakers of all the 13 languages we supports. We have people from all over Europe in our team (which makes it a fabulous team to work in).

Naturally most of the people we employ are not native to the country we are in. So getting native speakers can be tricky. It is not at all political correct - but the men and women who leave their native country to pursue happiness and fulfilment (privately and professionally) are not your "ideal" CC profile, these people are generally looking for love either new (thanks to Internet dating we see many people here) or more mature (trailing spouses). They would probably never have applied for a CC job in their native country, and they do not fit the profile at all but we hire them anyway.
And what we have discovered is that although these people generally are overqualified for the job, they thrive here. The teams benefit from the International feel and atmosphere and the ideas for improving our service and procedures are never ending.

The only exception to this is the team supporting the country we are based in. Here we have a team that matches the profile for at least 80% of the people. This provides us with a team with many conflicts (I am a woman so I feel OK saying this - "maybe too many women on one team is not cool"). Needless to say the conflicts are rarely work related and incredible personal (sometimes it is almost like living a soap).

OK, for the over qualified men and women on my team we need to keep them happy with more interesting projects, special responsibilities and such, and once in a while (but rarely) do we loose one of them because they find a job in their own field of specialty. So we have to find those projects and special responsibilities... but I think it is a small - and very interesting price to pay, for conflict free teams full of positive energy.

So I have stopped caring for the Ideal Customer Care Agent Profile.

Crazy measurements

If you work in a call center you are most like to have lots of KPIs. Answer rate, max wait time, average call time , average hold time , ring on no answer, I could go on and on… that combined with scripts makes an agents job really limited and frankly not so interesting if you have some brain (which let’s face it most of the customer care agents have).

Whilst a script might be good to lean on if you are new it is very limited in really interacting with your customers. And why is average call time even a measurement anybody sane want to use, is it better to jab through a call in 1.5 minutes and leave a customer unsatisfied and chances are he will call back again or spend that extra 1 min to ensure that customer is happy and understand the next steps? I know what get my vote.

I my ideal world the agents will get enough training for them to feel comfortable to actually talk to the customers and give them good and proper advice/help…..hey let go crazy here and provide some real service!

Let the call take as long as it should….. not a whole lot of things which are worse than if you as a customer feel rushed. I bet you will not only see an improvement in the customer satisfaction but also in the number of issues handled in the first call, and most importantly you will also see a improvement in your employee satisfaction.

I work in Europe; everybody on my team speaks at least two languages fluently but most speaks four or five. Around 85% are not native to the country we work in – but the country we work for. And let’s face it, it is probably the more openminded and indepent ones who move abroad to start a new life long away from friends and family. Most of the team is actually overqualified for the job… and the ones which have the “ideal” profile are the ones who really cause issues, so in my eyes there are no more an ideal profile…… If I ask these super clever people to only tell the customers what is on the script and that they can only spend 1.5 min on the phone, instead of letting them talk to the customer who needs for 5 min and give a service the agent as well as the company can be proud of and the customer can be satisfied with.

Is Customer Care an unworthy job?

I am sure we have all read the books - maybe even tried it out in front of the mirror:


I am talking about Self-esteem boosting.

Does it work if you stand in front of the mirror every morning and tell you self that you are strong and beautiful when you know you are not that strong and on the beautiful scale – you probably manage a “pretty enough”. I do not know…. I leave that to others to decide.

What I do know is, if you constantly hear that the job you do is the lowliest of all jobs in an organization – you will believe it.

I work with people who are smart, educated and in every other sense have a very high self esteem. But when it comes to their job as Customer Care agents they are sure the job they do is of little value to the company and they decide to see their job as an unfortunate interlude in an otherwise fabulous career.

That is wrong.

When I go out and meet new people I am always asked “what do you do for a living?” if I answer “I am in Customer Care…” their eyes glaze over and they quickly move on to more pressing subjects such as “where do you live?” or “do you have children?” – if on the other hand I tell them I am responsible for a team of 80 customer facing professional s – I get more questions and “ahh” and “ohhs”.

Why is it that a Customer Service agent is seen as a job not worth doing?

In fact it is one of the most satisfying jobs you can have. Granted it is incredible hard and stressful – it takes a certain kind of person to multitask the entire day, to be given scripts and measurement for everything you do. Not to mention the potential that somebody will listen into or tape the conversations you have with your customers. Not many Sales reps, logistics people, VP’s or even CEO’s, would be able to work under such pressure day after day after day.

And although I am slowly changing the opinion in my team it is like turning a big oceanliner - it takes a long time...

Moving the Company vision from cost to profit

Why is it so difficult for companies to get the treatment of the customer right? Maybe you need to get the company vision right.


First of all most companies are seeing their Customer Service department as a cost center not profit center. I am sure I am not alone when I have been in the situation that the company launches an new customer focused initiative where “we are really going to differentiate ourselves with the great service we provide” - as long as there are no added costs. Albeit not necessarily impossible for a company to improve their customer service without added costs – if you run a somewhat mature department the low-hanging fruit are all gone and you probably need to spend some, to make it happen.

Secondly, Customer service agent is regarded an entry level job (and I am sure if you work in Customer Service, you have seen how quickly the high performers are snatched up by other departments and you have to hire and train again). Of course it is great that Customer service agents can grow and develop in the company, but would it not be wonderful if the rest of the company did see CS as a valued and important link to the customers, gave them the credit and by that actually also improved the job satisfaction of the CS agent.

That is a big part of the issue. The CS agents are not proud and happy with what they do, after being told time and time again how low their job is – I see fine people doing a great job. And they are not proud of their job!!! I believe this is one of the first things that needs to be tackled – Make sure your agents are proud of what they are doing!!!