If you have a call center, you’ll be very popular if you have pleasant people answer the phone. If you have had a rough day and you talk to a jerk on the phone, it can set you off your edge very easily. One mean person on the phone can ruin your day if you are sensitive. But, pleasant people don’t always have the skills to handle people’s business problems.
Smart people like computer programmers, technical agents, and senior business people have great skills. But, they are not always patient, kind, or empathetic.
So, how do you have that perfect mix of capable vs. pleasant workers? One call center client threatened to shoot themselves if they were put on hold once more. But, what if you had a pleasant person to babysit the client instead of putting them on hold. Yes, that is expensive, but would it make a difference? It probably would and might even be worth the cost if the clients are paying decent money for your service. Instead of talking to a robot, imagine being able to talk to a very pleasant person who could make small talk and route you to the correct person when they were ready. Your call might take equally long, but it would be much more pleasant.
On the other hand, what if you trained your most pleasant people to be technically saavy. Would it be possible? They might be able to learn light technical tasks in a few months, and it might be worth it if they stuck around. Could you also train your geeky people to be more personable? That might be a little more difficult. But, you might take the edge off their geeky behavior with some one-on-one smoothness training.
Having the perfect staff is a combination of good hiring, balance, and molding your staff to be the way you want them. In my opinion, instead of training people all at once, staff members should get two or three hours of training each week to kee them growing at all times. If you train them all in the beginning and they quit, you’ve lost a lot of ground which is why spreading it out makes sense.