Personality, attention to detail and telephone manner

Over 1,200 potential callcenter sales staff answered a printed job advertisement by telephone. Trained raters judged the applicant on 3 dimensions and around 450 were called to a face- to-face interview. At the interview they were given a personality test (NEO-FFI; Costa & McCrae, 1992) and a Customer Service Aptitude Test that was devised for this study. Despite range restrictions on rated telephone behavior the personality variables correlated with both actual telephone interview rating and a customer service aptitude test. Regressions showed that Extraversion was the only significant predictor of the total rated interview score. Open, stable and agreeable females did best on the customer service aptitude test.