Requirements for Quality Human Resources
Based on a presentation by Ruchira Mehrotra
Presented at e-Services Philippines 2006
February 17, 2006

People—very good and skilled people—are critical to the success of this industry. In recognition of this, I firmly believe that it is the job of key business stakeholders—Operations managers and executives, to be specific—and Human Resources departments to ensure that we are hiring the right talents and creating an infrastructure that allows our human capital to continue to grow and hone the behaviors and skills required of them in the job.

I would like to share my thoughts on the strength of this community and the source of this strength, the origins of which can be traced to the evolution of Philippine society. This source of strength is also the same source of some of the challenges we face in the call center industry in the Philippines.

At this point, I would like to state, as a disclaimer, that the following points are solely made from my perspective.

The Philippines, as a society, has its inherent strengths that make this industry buoyant and capable of continuous growth.

Ease of sociological adaptations creates distinct social interactions and group acceptance hardly seen in any culture. Respect for others and politeness is both a source and a natural disclosure of this sociological adaptation. There is an acceptance of a wide array of traits and behaviors that enable groups to exist and give a variety of individuals a sense of belonging.

We all know the need to belong is extremely strong in this society. Overall, belonging is a highly specialized response to the perceived social environment. It is very hard to believe that it could be anything but an evolved adaptation to the human social world. Magandang asal and mabuting asal are core values of Filipinos.

The desire to belong; the acceptance of a wide array of behaviors; sheer respect and politeness for new and unknown people and cultures have enabled a customer-friendly, flexible and adaptive society. These qualities were what the customer outsourcing world had been looking for until they set foot on these 7,000-plus islands.

Our industry so far has reaped great benefits from these Filipino cultural traits. The positive aspects of these qualities have enabled the call center boom. On the other hand, these behaviors have resulted in the creation of certain unique training programs in call centers.

Ang magandang dating provides a certain self-defense mechanisms by which an individual avoids being cast out of a group. Individuals avoid socially risqué behavior, become hypersensitive to social risk and send out signals in an attempt to elicit support from others within a social group. With the desire to belong, people are likewise less confrontational or competitive than they might normally be, since those are traits that would lead to high-risk situations. People sense that they are about to be excluded from a group they find important, and they adopt behaviors in an attempt to stay within this group and stave off exclusion. By becoming low-risk individuals, people prove to others that there is no reason to exclude them from the group, that they are “safe.”

Training opportunities can be found here, programs that enable confidence and give people the capability to be firm and teach them the art of saying no. These programs can become part of the training, coaching, and mentoring that takes place at call centers. In the Philippines, it’s common to communicate without hurting feelings and alienating others; consultation, persuasion and consensus are cultural ways of smoothing over any possible offenses.

In the US, for example, communication practices are a stark contrast: it means getting the message across without any clutter, without beating around the bush. Understanding American culture and being able to relate to Americans despite the cultural differences is something that can be taught, and will help produce successful employees in our business. This can be taught by multiple sources: training, coaching and experience. We do not seek these qualities at the point of hiring, but they are nonetheless important skills for success. It is, however, important for an individual to have a certain level of communication skill and a capacity to learn at the onset.

I do feel that the requirements for successful call center employees are not myriad or intense in nature, but—whatever they are—the main requirements are fluency and depth. One of the most basic and most important requirements has always been communication skills. This has grown beyond accent neutralization and grammar; it is tied up with the thought process and the speaker’s ability to standardize and simplify technical and corporate jargon that the caller can understand. Given the difference between Philippine culture and American culture, this is not an easy feat to accomplish. Communication, at least as far as call center work is concerned, involves maintaining control of a conversation and keeping it on track. Non-confrontational and polite society makes this difficult, but the right communication skills are ultimately learnable.

Communication can be enhanced over a period of time since the human capability for language is a very specific evolutionary adaptation. The only challenge is that this process is indeed evolutionary, and it takes time to learn, especially in a society where most of the communication is non-verbal, and where silence and sensing is a definitive communicative action. This creates other traits: being non-direct, non-confrontational, and non-argumentative. The default need to be more respectful in getting the message through creates some extremely unique training opportunities for call centers. It is important for the individual to unlearn some of the indirect ways of conveying a message.

One improvement that would truly equip call center hopefuls would be a change in the Philippine curriculum, a change that will hopefully enjoy the support of the government and that of private organizations. By using English as a mode of communication during an individual’s formative and educational stage, it loses its perception as a status language. To my perception, it is still seen as the language of academicians, writers, business people and superiors.

Changing this perception will improve opportunities for many instead of for the selected few that penetrate this intensely competitive industry. We might be hiring by the thousand this year, but those thousands cone around only after the rejection of millions. The call center industry is known for its 1 to 10-percent hit rate, depending on the projects involved. Imagine those numbers going up and what it would do to speed the growth of the industry and the country’s economy. The challenge is that those numbers can only improve if the desired level of language evolution comes at the formative stage and helps people evolve to the required level of competency for the language. I have yet to see a concerted effort in this direction.

While there are positive effects of social adaptation and the desire to belong in a group, there are negative effects as well. We’ve discussed that an individual exhibits behaviors that are risk-free and allow him effortless integration in a group. This poses a challenge to speaking fluently in English; most people hesitate to use a language that will make them feel socially excluded or tag them as boastful. This, I believe, is the reason why the English language drives we hear of in most call centers turn out to be challenges or borderline successes. While I respect and appreciate society’s need to use the native language for communication, it remains practical to understand the need for fluency of the one language that is understood across the globe. Fluency does not come about through various interventions but largely from daily usage and practice.

Another challenge—which is generally overlooked these days—is the lack of understanding of the call center industry itself. This confuses me and I’m not sure if I should be surprised here. Despite all the attention, promotion and support this industry is getting from various sectors, the fresh graduates and the workforce—our most important resource—still carry a perception that working at a call center is nothing more than being an operator. Sad to say, I have interacted with a lot of teachers who also do not understand the concept and the dynamism of the industry to date. In fact, words and phrases like “it is a bubble,” and “unstable industry” are still too frequent to be relished. It is indeed a challenge to hone and develop an individual for any work that is not understood or is perceived as something it is not. To help meet the quality requirements of the industry, the industry itself has to be understood and be seen in its true form. This can only begin with the most influential people in an individual’s life: the educator. There are, I believe, only three people who can create and change a person—one’s mother, one’s father, and one’s teacher.

All the stress on the communication requirements of call centers—the flow, the socio-linguistic fluency needed for strategic interaction and the difference in the default training of the average Filipino leads to one thing: training opportunities, especially since the difference is learnable.

Let me define learnability now: it is the ability of an individual to understand concepts and review the practical experiences that are shared in a structured environment—like workshops and training seminars—and use it in unstructured environments—like in talking to callers. Therefore, it can be learned, but there is another important criterion.

The time scale of the learning curve in a call center is short, and the products and technology in which they are trained keep changing and updating at a steep pace. Hence the capability to take the concept in one setting and apply it to another is extremely important. This is assessed even during the recruitment stage, through the sharing of experiences of how challenging situations were handled and what the individual learned. Certain levels of learning aptitudes must be present at the onset.

Last but not the least, another behavior we look for in a candidate is stress tolerance. We all know the speed of decision-making, the nature of work, the learning curve, the content of service and product that is subject to frequent change than those of older industries. It is not everyone’s forte to accept that frequency and speed of change. Certain levels of stress tolerance are essential not only to survive but to enjoy and thrive in this world. Chaos also brings opportunities—both in volume and frequency. People who can accept the challenge really grow.

To summarize what one needs to be a call-center success, one needs flexibility, the capability to build trust, the ability to accept differences, openness to change, the ability to control conversations across the differences in culture, the ability to apply things learned in structured environments to unstructured, nebulous situations, the ability to learn quickly, and a high tolerance for stress. These are some of the more essential features of a good call center employee.