Choosing the right individuals to represent your business is essential for your future growth and brand perception. According to Microsoft, 96% of consumers say that customer service is crucial in creating brand loyalty.
One needs to evaluate customer service representatives based on their skills, attitudes, and perceptions before hiring them for such a critical role.
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Since every organization is unique, the criteria for selecting customer service agents should be predefined. After finalizing the requirements, you should create a set of questions that helps you choose capable representatives. Let us now delve deeper into the essential questions in a customer service interview and decode their ideal responses.
Top Customer Service Interview Questions (+ Interview Tips)
The questions you ask your prospective customer service candidates should help you screen through them based on the criteria defined for your organization. To help you make a wider choice, we have prepared a list of some essential questions for candidates to answer, which are as follows:
1. What does Customer Service mean to you?
This is an excellent screening question to check the general perception of a candidate regarding customer service. Understanding what their philosophy or goals are can help you know if they would be a good fit for your company’s culture or not.
Any candidate who speaks about the significance and impact of customers on the growth of an organization and understands that customer retention is key to a company’s success should be a good fit for your organization. Thus, Individuals who believe that assisting customers and improving their lives would positively impact the company and their lives must be on your team.
2. What did ‘success’ look like in your former job role?
Irrespective of their previous job role, it is also essential to understand what success means to a candidate. Whether their former job role was related to customer service or not, you must know if they value customer satisfaction as a critical component of their accomplishment. The person should also choose team success over individual triumph.
3. Can you introduce us to your present or previous boss/reporting manager as a reference?
Knowing that you would be speaking to their previous boss makes candidates less likely to overstate their achievements. Moreover, if a customer service candidate readily shares the contact details of their former supervisors, it is a clear indication that they are being honest.
4. What do you think success would look like in your new job role (at your organization)?
This question is very similar to the question mentioned above, but its purpose is to determine if the candidate understands your business goals or not.
Besides knowing their stance on customer service and teamwork, answers to this question help you figure out what their ideas about your company’s mission are and whether they have researched well about the job role well or not. It is possible that a candidate does not have a clear understanding of your company, but their answers would offer an insight into their core values and demonstrate their interest in the role.
5. What was the biggest challenge in your previous role, and how did you overcome it?
Through this question, you can judge the coachability and honesty of a prospective customer service assistant. Failure is a part of everyone’s journey, but it is crucial to understand what an individual learns from it.
A candidate’s response to the above question speaks volumes about their problem-solving ability and attitude. You may also discover how responsible and resilient they are based on the problems they have faced.
6. Mention a weakness without which you would be a better customer service employee?
An individual who knows their shortfalls and understands the impact of their inadequacies on their work ( and their team) would be an asset to any customer service team. An honest and polite answer from them will help you know if their shortfall would interfere with the role they are being interviewed for.
7. Tell them to describe a common process.
As a customer service assistant, an individual must be able to individual needs to explain processes, protocols, and best practices on a daily basis. Hence, if they can patiently explain a process step-by-step in great detail, they should be a good addition to your team.
See if you can follow their instructions and understand them clearly. If you cannot understand their instructions, the chances are that your customers won’t as well.
8. How would/do you de-escalate an angry customer?
No amount of customer service training can teach you how to empathize with a person. This is why each candidate needs to be asked the above question. Applicants who understand that a customer’s anger is due to frustration or previous bad experiences are usually the ones who can empathize with them.
You should also look for answers that mention conflict resolution skills, such as an apology and humility. Such traits can help turn negative experiences into positive ones.
9. Describe your personal career goals
The above question helps you gauge how driven or motivated a candidate is. Highly motivated candidates would tell you where they would like to be in the next few years and how they want to add more value to the company. However, many people do not have a distinct career path chalked out.
In such cases, you must try to know the skills and qualities they want to acquire through their journey and the kind of impact they want to have on their customer service team and company.
10. What was the most challenging customer service case that you have ever handled?
A customer service assistant deals with numerous customer issues on a daily basis. However, you can quickly discover their empathy and positivity levels through this question. Watch out for candidates who speak about the absurdity of a request or the irrationality of a customer.
Candidates who put the entire blame on the client and mention their frustration with the whole experience are the ones who took the experience negatively.
A good candidate would never speak ill about customers, no matter how much the discomfort. Instead, they view it as a learning opportunity and empathize with customers. Such candidates would also tell you the strategies they had used to solve the problem, or their answers would let you know if they can think on their feet.
11. How would you rewrite this generic/default response?
Provide the candidate with a poorly drafted company response and ask how they can improve it. Give them a few minutes to rewrite it and ask them about the faults in the given copy. You must also ask them about the changes they made in the document and the reason behind them.
A good candidate would be able to find all the fallacies and logical errors in the given response and could help you modify it better. They could also help you connect better with the audience by removing jargon and clearly conveying the message.
12. What does empathy mean to you? Give an example of how you have used empathy in your previous job role.
This question helps you understand what the candidate considers an empathetic reaction. The candidate can describe empathy in their own words, and you can know how they usually empathize with customers.
A good answer should demonstrate how they create a rapport with the customer, what reassurances they have provided, and how well they could solve the problem for the customers. Even if they could not solve the problem immediately, you should try to know how they left the customer after hearing out their issue and answering their questions.
13. Tell me about a time when you received poor feedback from a customer. How could you have done it better?
A good customer service assistant would tell you what was expected of them and where they fell short. They would be able to put themselves in the customer’s place and let you see the problem from their perspective. Next, they would tell you how they could have handled the issue better, which would help you know that they have analyzed themselves and introspected about what they could have done right.
14. What does ‘customer delight’ mean to you?
Delighting customers means going above and beyond to support them and provide them with a seamless experience. A good candidate would know the difference between decent and exceptional customer service. Their answers should demonstrate competency in managing customer service issues and organizational innovation to offer customized support.
15. Which time management tricks do you use to balance high call volumes and internal responsibilities?
This is an issue faced by almost every customer service executive. Managing high call volumes with the internal workload is a genuine concern for all customer service employees. Thus, candidates must tell you how they handle such crises and get going even during difficult times. Their answers should help you evaluate their work ethics, resilience, and ability to innovate.
16. Tell us about a time when you could not solve a customer’s issue.
Many a time, a customer service assistant is unable to solve the problems faced by a customer. However, that does not mean that they cannot provide a good experience to customers or exceed their expectations.
Ideally, the candidate should be able to describe the problem in detail, along with the actions taken by them and the reason why the problem couldn’t be resolved. Find out how they managed customers’ expectations and whether they followed up with the customer later.
17. Tell me about a time when you went the extra mile for a customer.
Look for candidates who understand that managing professional responsibilities and simultaneously delighting customers is challenging, and articulate how they provided an innovative solution within the purview of organizational guidelines. The intention to offer a stellar experience and desire to exceed expectations should be clear from their replies.
18. What is the difference between delivering good customer service and a great experience?
Any customer service agent must understand what customers want and how we can deliver it. They must also be able to realize how customers’ experiences can be improved further and what kind of actions can be taken to ensure customer delight.
Essential Traits For Customer Service Representatives
To hire the best personnel, it is wise to ask them a few important questions that would help you gauge their professionalism, outlook, and ability to empathize – character traits that are difficult to teach or imbibe).
However, before coming up with the questions, you must consider what you’re hoping to learn about them. Further, candidates’ responses would help you determine their appropriateness for the positions.
Hence, we have listed the four major traits that customer service agents should be judged on:
1. Zeal
Customer success managers should be driven, motivated, adaptive, and hungry to face and overcome challenges. The best customer service managers never shy away from proving their mettle and yet are not entitled. As a result, such individuals grow consistently, climbing the corporate ranks while adding value to their organization.
2. Teachability
A customer service manager (CSM) must be ready to learn and update his perceptions when presented with new knowledge. Fast and constant learners, who react positively to constructive criticism, make great customer service representatives.
3. Optimism
An optimistic attitude can help turn around the most challenging situations. Positivity is infectious, and a good attitude can positively impact customer perception and team morale. Thus, it is wise to ensure that all your new hires have a positive outlook.
4. Empathy
Understanding customers’ struggles and putting oneself in their shoes makes for a good customer service assistant. Most customer service software and chatbots today aspire to provide empathetic reactions. Reacting empathically through a proper understanding of consumer issues and positive reassurances go a long way in improving customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
In addition to the above, all team members in your client support units must receive appropriate customer service training on skills needed for your industry. For instance, some industries emphasize written communication instead of verbal communication. Others may require you to think on your feet or stick to a definite process.
Conclusion
There are thousands of questions that you can ask in a customer service interview, depending on your industry or business needs. However, to choose the best individuals for the role, you have to find candidates who view your customers as your own and are willing to assist them with a sense of responsibility and ownership.
A Backpacker with keen interest in Digital marketing. Responsible and passionate for building a digital culture at SoftwareSuggest. Grabber to implement new competitive ideas to analyze and boost online presence. Could be found in mountains and solo traveler by birth.
