Are you hiring the right customer service people?

I often am asked and see the question, “How do we begin offering great customer service“. You can have the greatest plan, all of the right materials, structure, and systems in place, but you can’t get great customer service if you don’t have the right people. 

How do you hire the right customer service people?

What are the qualities, skills, background, and abilities should you look for? What type of resume are you looking for? Well, honestly, resumes will matter little when it comes to hiring great customer service people.

People are not your most important asset, the RIGHT people are.

-Jim Collins, From Good to Great

The great service stars, are found in all areas of business and doing all sorts of things. You can’t narrow your search to a specific college degree or a specific number of years of experience, you’ll miss out on too many great people. A resume won’t show or prove some key qualities of the customer service stars.

Kate Nasser has beautifully described the perfect qualities of the natural customer service stars. Some of the qualities include:

• Accept the absurdity of life without using sarcasm toward the customer.
• Easily adapt; need for control is low.
• Brilliantly balance objectivity and caring.
• Exhibit a high sense of ownership and teamwork.
• Love to serve because of the giving — not to be liked or loved in return.

When interviewing for customer service, forget the resume.

When hiring for customer service, resumes will let you know what type of day-to-day work the individual has done, but it doesn’t say anything about who they are. Resumes tell you if they’ve answered phones, worked on computers, worked face-to-face with customers, are comfortable answering high volume of emails, if they like to work in an office environment, if they are confortable with a desk job, etc. That’s important, but just until interview time.

Your customer service job interview should be an audition. It’s the individual’s time to show you who they are and let their personality shine. I don’t bring resumes to interviews. I bring a sheet of paper with questions for the individual. I tell them that I already know their work experience, schooling, etc. from their resume. Now I want to get to know them as a person. I give them most of the rest of the time to just talk. Then I sit back and listen. The service naturals shine, they want to make a difference. They want to connect with people, do the right thing, and feel like the work they do each day helps someone’s day be better. For the rest, it’s just a paycheck.

If you had to take one of your customer service team members and place them on a national ad campaign profiling your service brand, who would you pick? The one who wants to make a difference, change the world, connect with people, and who feels that service is their mission in life? Or one to whom work is just a paycheck?