Planning and booking vacation reservations for hundreds of thousands of families each year requires a very large staff of astute call center agents. If those agents happen to be high performers with a strong aptitude for sales, increased revenue can quickly grow into millions.

Management for this world-famous resort knew this. What they did not know was whether an agent’s on-the-job success was due to training, personality, previous experience, personal initiative, or a combination of these traits. They needed to identify exactly what it was that created these high performers, and more importantly, how to hire more of them.

The PreVisor® team of industrial-organizational psychology professionals conducted a scientific job analysis using a series of surveys, interviews and observations of current call center agents. From this, PreVisor recommended a suite of assessments to measure the attributes in job-seeking candidates.

Two of the assessments examined the degree to which agents exhibited the skills and behaviors associated with effective sales and customer service and to what degree the agents enjoyed behaving this way. The third assessment showed agent effectiveness in a call center environment, which included hard skills such as keystrokes per minute, calls per hour, and data entry accuracy. To determine the score that only the top performers would pass, hundreds of current agents were given the PreVisor assessments. The results were correlated to performance metrics of the most successful and high-selling agents.

Hiring managers now have the insight to select the candidates most likely to have a positive impact on revenue. In fact, they know that each candidate who passes will generate approximately $73 to $180 more per hour in sales than those who score below the passing scores, potentially contributing millions of dollars in additional revenue per year.