Banking Company: Strengths-Based Selection

One of the largest banks in North America needed a solution to improve sales performance in three call centers. Gallup consultants recommended a long-term selection and hiring strategy aimed at hiring more employees with talents similar to those of their best and upgrading the levels of talent in two key front-line customer service and sales positions:

• Customer Service Representative
• Inbound Sales Representative

Working closely with client management, Gallup created strengths-based selection profiles for these positions. Gallup consultants tailored the selection profiles to meet the client's business needs by:

• studying the client's call center structure and business strategy
• reviewing the client's job performance criteria for each role
• studying the best performers in each role to identify the talents that contributed to their success

Gallup then developed success models and constructed customized structured interviews to assess job applicants. Next, Gallup built a turnkey interviewing system that efficiently qualified, assessed, and scored job applicants, as well as an information delivery system that provided assessment results to the individual making the crucial hiring decisions.

After the client had used this performance improvement solution for several years, follow-up Business Impact Analysis demonstrated that employees hired using Gallup's process and system delivered a higher sales success rate. New hires who achieved high scores on the Gallup selection interviews substantially outperformed their lower scoring counterparts.

Customer Service Representative

Customer service representatives (CSRs) who scored highly on the Gallup selection assessment produced substantially more sales revenue than did lower scoring CSRs. High-scoring CSRs consistently outperformed their counterparts in:

• total sales revenue
• referral revenue (referring sales leads to other bank agents)
• fee-based product revenue
• mortgage and loan revenue

Gallup's analysis also revealed that CSRs who scored in the top quartile on the Gallup assessment performed at a substantially higher level, on average on the four metrics above, than CSRs who were hired before the Gallup solution was implemented.

Inbound Sales Representative

Inbound sales representatives (ISRs) hired using the Gallup selection process produced substantially more sales revenue more efficiently than did ISRs with much lower scores.

• ISRs scoring in the top third outperformed ISRs in the bottom third. High-scoring ISRs:
  • produced 32% more sales on average
  • spent 3.5 fewer minutes handling an average phone call
  • were 40% less likely to have their loans subjected to reprocessing or rejection due to poor or inadequate information on the original loan application
• Based on goals established for each call center, product type, and market segment, the sales productivity for ISRs scoring in the top third of the Gallup selection interview ranged from $160,000 to $300,000 per representative per month, significantly out-performing ISRs scoring in the bottom third.
• Overall, ISRs hired using the Gallup interview process were more productive and outperformed those hired before the Gallup interview process was put in place.

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