There’s a long-running debate in contact centre recruitment: are great contact agents born or made?
Do you need to find people with some innate quality, a natural gift for service, a temperament that just fits. Or can you take someone with the right attitude and train them into excellence?
We asked over 100 contact centre professionals, and they were pretty clear about it.
87% of respondents said anyone can succeed in a contact centre with the right training and support.
Only 11% believed you need innate qualities that can’t be taught.
That’s a significant majority saying it’s not about finding magical unicorn candidates. It’s about what happens after you hire them.
This matters because it challenges one of the assumptions embedded into a lot of contact centre recruitment. The idea that you need to screen for “naturals”: people who just get it, who’ve done it before, who won’t need much hand-holding.
The people doing the work are telling you something different. They’re saying focus less on finding the finished article, and more on setting people up to develop.
When we asked what skills or traits make someone good at contact centre work, three themes dominated.
This was the most frequently mentioned skill. Not “being chatty” or “good on the phone” but the ability to actually hear what someone’s saying, understand the real issue beneath the surface question, and respond in a way that lands.
Active listening is harder than it sounds. It means parking your assumptions, resisting the urge to jump to solutions, and making the customer feel heard before you try to fix anything.
Can you screen for this? Yes but not by looking at CVs. You screen for it in how someone handles a role-play scenario. How they respond to a curveball question in an interview. Whether they ask clarifying questions or barrel straight to an answer.
This was the second most mentioned quality. The ability to stay in someone’s corner even when they’re being difficult. To remember that the person on the other end of the line is having a bad day, not being a bad person.
Patience isn’t about being passive. It’s about not letting frustration leak into your voice on call number 47 of the day. It’s about treating the last customer like they’re the first.
This one’s harder to screen for directly, but you can get signals. How does someone talk about difficult customer experiences in previous roles? Do they frame it as “nightmare customers” or “challenging situations I had to navigate”? The language tells you a lot.
That’s why rethinking contact centre experience as essential is important. Candidates without this skill set but who have a background in hospitality, for example, are great at demonstrating answers to this question.
Contact centre work is relentless. The calls keep coming. Some days are a slog. The people who thrive are the ones who can bounce back from a tough call, adapt when processes change, and not carry one bad interaction into the next.
We believe that resilience doesn’t mean being unaffected. It means recovering. And it’s often built through experience which is why onboarding and ongoing support matter so much. You can’t expect someone to be resilient on day one. You can help them build it over time.
If success is trainable, and the key qualities are communication, empathy, and resilience, then your job isn’t to find people who already have it all figured out.
It’s to find people with the raw ingredients – and then invest in developing them.
That has implications for screening. It means looking beyond “two years’ contact centre experience” and asking: does this person listen well? Do they stay composed under pressure? Can they put themselves in someone else’s shoes?
It also has implications for onboarding. If you’re hiring people without prior experience (and our data suggests you should be open to that) they’ll need more support upfront. More exposure to real calls. More feedback loops.
Rushing them through because you need bums on seats? That’s how you turn a promising hire into an early leaver.
One thing worth considering: are you setting expectations clearly from the start?
If someone joins thinking the role is one thing and discovers it’s another, that’s not a training problem – it’s a recruitment problem. And it might hit inexperienced hires harder, because they’ve got less frame of reference for what contact centre work actually feels like.
Live job previews – letting candidates listen to real calls, shadow for an hour, get a genuine taste of the day-to-day – can help. Not everyone will like what they see, but that’s the point.
But let’s be realistic, we get that assessing these skills at scale is a challenge. An ongoing one at that. And perhaps it’ll be something that becomes a little more straightforward with the use of AI or more refined screening tools.
This is one of seven findings from The Great Contact Centre Survey – our research into what contact centre workers wish employers knew about attracting, hiring, and keeping the right people.
