Contact centers must deliver more than they ever have before. Interactions are more complex, customers are less patient, products are more configurable, and channels now span voice, chat (including video), email, and social platforms.
In response, organizations have steadily raised the bar for what “good” talent looks like. In this article, which I have divided into three parts, I focus on three skill areas where the hiring bar is rising fast.
I covered digital and AI literacy in Part 1, while emotional intelligence is discussed in Part 2 here. Language skills will then be examined in Part 3.
Increasing Emotional Intelligence Requirements
As skill expectations rise across the contact center role, emotional intelligence (EI) is becoming a more explicit requirement.
In many hiring conversations, however, EI is still confused with emotional quotient (EQ), which is often treated as a static trait or general impression.
In this discussion, EI refers to a set of job-relevant skills: recognizing emotion accurately, regulating one’s response, and applying judgment effectively under pressure.
These are not abstract traits. They are capabilities that can be defined, measured, and strengthened over time.
Many customer interactions increasingly involve frustration, confusion, or emotional escalation, especially when customers have already attempted self-service or digital support.
In these moments, the representatives’ ability to remain steady, empathetic, and effective often determines whether the interactions end in resolution or escalations.
As skill expectations rise...emotional intelligence (EI) is becoming a more explicit requirement.
EI, in this context, is best understood as a set of job-relevant skills:
- Emotional regulation when under pressure.
- Accurately reading customers’ tone and intent.
- Effective de-escalation when customers are frustrated and angry.
- Maintaining clarity and professionalism within real constraints (policy boundaries, compliance language, and productivity expectations).
These skills directly influence resolution quality, escalation rates (to senior agents or supervisors), and customer trust.
Importantly, EI has both a learnable skill component and a measurable dispositional component.
This is why personality assessment remains highly relevant. In many contact center environments, personality-based measures provide a useful signal of service-related predispositions, such as empathy orientation, patience, resilience, and emotional stability.
These traits are not a substitute for training, but they are meaningful predictors of who is most likely to thrive in emotionally demanding work and sustain performance over time.
If EI can be learned, then the environments in which people work, practice, and receive feedback become central to whether those skills actually develop.
EI Skills Practice, Reinforcement
At the same time, EI skills still require practice and reinforcement. As a CMSWire article written by Lindsay Sullivan notes, “Associates need safe spaces to practice and develop these skills.”
When those spaces are constrained, the development of EI becomes inconsistent, and organizations often look elsewhere to compensate.
That point matters operationally, particularly in heavily coached and monitored contact center environments. Representatives often work under continuous observation: interactions are recorded, quality scores are tracked, and performance metrics are highly visible.
If EI can be learned, then the environments in which people work, practice, and receive feedback become central to whether those skills actually develop.
While this structure supports consistency and compliance, it can also make EI skills harder to develop if coaching conversations feel primarily evaluative rather than developmental.
That dynamic becomes more pronounced when coaching is operationalized as a tracked activity. In many organizations, sessions completed, forms logged, and action plans documented become the primary success indicators.
These measures serve important accountability functions, but they can also shift attention from learning to compliance.
Under pressure to manage volume, deliver outcomes, and document activity, supervisors may focus on correcting performance indicators rather than creating space for reflection and skill-building.
When that happens, EI becomes something representatives are expected to demonstrate, rather than a capability the organization actively develops.
Coaches and supervisors are often trained to document coaching activity and address performance indicators. But they receive far less support in how to deliver feedback that enables reflection and emotional skill development.
It is difficult to raise EI expectations without creating the proper training conditions and coaching environments that allow those skills to develop consistently.
When those conditions are missing, EI expectations do not disappear. They shift upstream into hiring, where organizations try to solve development challenges through selection decisions.
The unintended consequence is that EI can become a higher standard without becoming a better-developed or better-measured standard.
Organizations still expect representatives to demonstrate emotional regulation, empathy, and judgment under pressure. But they lack reliable mechanisms to build or even observe those skills over time.
This pattern is not accidental. EI is complex to observe, difficult to develop consistently under operational pressure, and is therefore often inferred rather than measured. When development is constrained, hiring is asked to compensate and proxies step in where direct evidence is missing.
Measuring EI Correctly
As organizations raise EI requirements, but assess them primarily through unstructured interviews, loosely scored role plays, or subjective evaluations of “professionalism,” it is no longer measured directly.
Instead, EI becomes a proxy for communication style, interview presence, or cultural familiarity. These signals may feel intuitive, but they are weak signals for job-relevant behavior that could drive improvements in job performance.
What feels like EI in an interview may simply be confidence or comfort with the format. Sounding calm is not the same as staying regulated when the situation is not.
In those cases, the hiring bar rises, but selection becomes less consistent and less transparent. Capable candidates are screened out for reasons that have little to do with their ability to succeed on the job, while others are screened in based on polish rather than performance potential.
If EI is a baseline requirement for modern contact center roles, it should be treated like any other job skill...
Frameworks such as the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) describe EI through observable and developable competencies (e.g., self-management and social awareness). This reinforces the point that it is not a personality label but instead it is a capability that can grow over time.
Raising EI requirements pre-hire is also not a neutral change in terms of access. It reshapes who is more likely to be screened in or out. What we call “empathy” or “professionalism” is filtered through cultural expectations about tone, expressiveness, and conversational style.
Without careful design, EI screening can become less about identifying who can succeed in the role and more about selecting candidates who sound right in an interview.
This method can also unintentionally penalize neurodivergent candidates who may communicate differently during screenings or role plays, despite their potential to excel in highly structured, workflow-intensive support roles. Particularly when the expectations are clear and coaching is structured.
In practice, it often creates a mismatch between selection and performance. Organizations can overestimate EI based on interview presence and underestimate it in candidates who are calmer, less expressive, or culturally different in their communication style.
The unintended consequences are avoidable false negatives and narrowed candidate pools: without measurable improvements in actual outcomes such as CSAT, resolution quality, or escalation volume.
Because EI is both critical to performance and difficult to observe directly, the solution is not to lower the EI bar, but to raise measurement quality and consistency.
When EI is assessed through unstructured interviews, subjective impressions of professionalism, or assumptions from work experience, organizations risk confusing familiarity with capability.
By contrast, when candidates are evaluated on observable behaviors such as:
- Recognizing customer emotion accurately,
- Choosing appropriate de-escalation strategies,
- Maintaining tone control, and
- Applying policy constraints with judgment,
EI becomes something that can be measured rather than as an attribute that can be inferred.
This approach keeps standards high without narrowing access unnecessarily. By defining EI in behavioral terms and applying consistent scoring, organizations can reduce noise and variability in hiring decisions while avoiding proxies that screen out capable candidates.
If EI is a baseline requirement for modern contact center roles, it should be treated like any other job skill: clearly defined, measured consistently, and strengthened through structured training and deliberate practice.
Without that discipline, rising EI expectations risk reinforcing the very hiring challenges organizations are trying to solve. This pattern becomes even more pronounced when other skills are screened using similar proxies.