Uncomplicate – How to interview for customer support
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
In an age where one bad customer support experience can turn the fortunes of a company, hiring the right support becomes critical. But how exactly do you identify the right people? What do you really look for in your interview process? How do you know if the person is perfect for the role?
Stacy Justino, director of customer happiness at Wistia, has some actionable tips you could use.
“Some of the key traits that I look for while hiring customer support people are problem solving skills, curiosity, adaptability, accountability, and collaboration skills,” said Justino.
Even though these skills might seem applicable for any job, it is especially crucial for support because it is a customer facing role. Support agents are usually the customer’s connect to the company, and are the face or voice of the company. Even a small slip up could prove costly.
The trick to follow while interviewing is to select a skill, say collaboration, and then fit it into the questions you ask. For collaboration, the question could be ‘take us through the last time you taught someone to use a technical tool or work related process’. Gauge the person’s response, judge if he/she was truly collaborative in that situation, and then arrive at a conclusion.
Further drill down and ask questions like— what was the tool or process that you had to teach, why was it important, steps you took to drive the point home, how did you offer your help, and other such focused questions.
This ‘drilling down’ style of questioning will help you build the ‘collaborator’ profile of the interviewee. Do this with every other skill you have in mind, and keep building up the interviewee’s profile.
Reports say that poor customer service is costing businesses more than $75 billion a year. Keeping these hard numbers in mind, it makes real business sense to put efforts into hiring the best support folks.
Support roles require the person to be on his/her toes everyday, so it is your job to put the person into everyday job scenarios and measure their response.
The truth is even if you have a hundred tools to help you in the customer support process, at the end of the day, the agent’s heart has to be in the right place to really understand the customer’s request and help accordingly. And your role, is to identify based on both skill, and heart.
This blogpost was co-written by Vignesh Jeyaraman. The blog was edited by Vinithra Madhavan Menon.
