Using self-organizing maps to model turnover of sales agents in a call center

This paper proposes an approach for modeling employee turnover in a call center using the versatility of supervised self-organizing maps. Two main distinct problems exist for the modeling employee turnover: first, to predict the employee turnover at a given point in the sales agent's trial period, and second to analyze the turnover behavior under different performance scenarios by using psychometric information about the sales agents. Identifying subjects susceptible to not performing well early on, or identifying personality traits in an individual that does not fit with the work style is essential to the call center industry, particularly when this industry suffers from high employee turnover rates. Self-organizing maps can model non-linear relations between different attributes and ultimately find conditions between an individual's performance and personality attributes that make him more predisposed to not remain long in an organization. Unlike other models that only consider performance attributes, this work successfully uses psychometric information that describes a sales agent's personality, which enables a better performance in predicting turnover and analyzing potential personality profiles that can identify agents with better prospects of a successful career in a call center. The application of our model is illustrated and real data are analyzed from an outbound call center.