It’s obviously important that you have the right people for your customer service roles. But how do you identify who are the right people?

It’s most important to select people who have the right attributes to perform well in a customer service environment. They don’t necessarily need to have customer service skills and experience – you can train them if necessary – but having the right attributes is a strong indication of their customer service abilities. Trying to change an employee who has the wrong service attitudes and natural behaviours can be impractical.

So, what attributes should you select for?
You are looking for people who will:

• understand customers’ service expectations
• identify customers’ needs, and develop rapport with them
• satisfy customers’ needs, by being flexible
• try to exceed expectations, by recognising the opportunities to go the extra mile, and
• deal professionally with difficult situations, including customer complaints.

How do you recruit for these attributes?
It can be hard in an interview to select for those attributes. Often people don’t know what their own strengths and competencies are and what they say in an interview often bears little resemblance to how they will perform in the workplace in practice.

The best approach is to use a technique called "behavioural interviewing". The best predictor of a person’s future behaviour is their previous behaviour in a similar situation – and behavioural interviewing focuses on exactly this.

What does behavioural interviewing involve?
In a behavioural interview you are trying to gather examples of the behaviours related to the attributes required for the job you are recruiting for. So, you might ask a question like:

"Can you give me an example of when you had a particularly difficult customer to deal with? What did you do to deal with the situation?”

When the person answers your question, it’s important that you get specific, job relevant examples of behaviour. We recommend you take the Challenge, Action, Results (CAR) approach. You need to get the candidate to:

• explain the Challenge they faced, to
• identify the Action they took in response to that challenge, and then
• describe the Results – or benefits – of taking that action.

What if the person doesn’t have relevant customer service experience? In this case you could ask them for an example from their personal life, or alternatively give them a particular scenario and ask them to describe what they might do.

Contact us
Do you need help in recruiting the right people for your customer service roles? Using the services of our sister company, Employee Relations Strategies Pty Ltd, we can help you to develop systems and processes so your organisation identifies the people with the right attributes to deliver the right levels of customer service to your customers. And we can help develop performance review systems that will provide your staff with feedback on how they are performing on those key attributes.

Contact us on 1300 60 1234 to discuss how we can help.