Psychographic Matching between a Call Center Agent and a Customer

Abstract

The interpersonal compatibility of a company agent and a customer significantly affects the outcome of their communication. In existing research, however, compatibility has been studied only in terms of the similarity in personality and values. That is, agents and customers were compared only on the same dimensions that make up their personality and values, e.g., on the same trait of the Big Five (compared agent's Extraversion and customer's Extraversion) or same values as per Schwartz's Basic Values (agent's Conformity and customer's Conformity). In this paper, we studied compatibility from a broader perspective, i.e., in addition to the similarity, we investigated interactions across different dimensions (e.g., an agent's Extraversion and a customer's Conformity, or the former's Extraversion and the latter's Neuroticism). Examining 7,594 real call logs collected from telemarketing call centers, we have confirmed that such different dimensional interactions significantly affect a customer making a purchase (i.e., a customer's conversion) or not. A simulation where we matched agents and customers demonstrated that our compatibility model that incorporated the interactions across different dimensions yielded significant conversion lift, i.e., +46% on the average, compared from one that used only similarity in personality and values.