Julia Weeks
When interviewing candidates for a position in your call center, the questions you ask during the interview process can either make or break your hiring process. Since your call center employees are directly working with your customers, it is of utmost importance that you hire the right person for the job.
There are 3 behavioral style questions you should be asking any candidate you are considering for a position in your call center.
1. Tell me about a time you were faced with a difficult customer.
As with any behavioral style question, you want to have the candidate walk you through the situation and what made the customer difficult. Then, follow up with questions such as:
What did you do? Why?
What was the outcome?
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
By asking these questions, you are looking for the candidate to help you understand their ability to handle difficult or uncomfortable situations with customers. Let’s face it, when working in a call center there is a fairly good chance each employee will run into a difficult customer from time to time. You want to make sure that your employees are calm, positive, and resourceful when these situations occur.
2. Describe a situation when you had to persuade a customer to see things your way.
As with any call center position, there will be times when your employees are convincing your customers to stay with your company or try new products. The skill of friendly persuasion is a must have for call center employees. However, it is important that your employees are not too pushy, which can be a turn-off for many customers.
When asking a candidate to explain how they persuaded a customer to see things their way, you want to be sure that you get a good feel for how creative they can be in these situations.
Follow up with questions such as:
What was the situation?
What did you do? How did you know to do that?
What was the outcome?
3. Give me an example of a time when you had many tasks to juggle at once within a limited amount of time.
In a call center environment, employees need to be able to multitask and juggle many different things at one time. Phones are ringing constantly, customers are on hold, customers have questions and needs, etc. It’s important that the person you decide to hire has the ability to juggle many different things at once, while still remaining calm and positive.
When asking the candidate for an example of multitasking, you want to pay attention to the tasks that the candidate was managing.
What kind of tasks were you managing?
What made it difficult to handle these tasks at once?
How did you prioritize?
Asking these follow up questions will help you to understand how the candidate goes about managing their day and handling many different things at once, while still remaining productive.
What are some questions that you ask when interviewing call center employees?
Images: 3DProfi/Bigstock.com
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