Customer service is too often treated as a cost-center.

Excellent customer service is going to drive sales, period. Your brand experience is a collective of every touch point customers interact with. Therefore, a vast majority is created via customer service.

Your customer service team will be driving return sales & referrals.

When hiring for a customer service rep, first look at the goals for this role. Do you want them to focus more on phone, email, in-person or live chat interactions? These goals will help when you are deciding between candidates later.

Two, create a job posting that contains information about your business, what the role entails, benefits, and salary. We include salaries on all job postings to help qualify candidates early on.

Market your job posting to everyone across all channels! Texting, Facebook, Craigslist, asking for referrals, and local job boards.

Interview for attitude and teach skills later. Are they optimistic, ready for a challenge, open for change, empathetic, and great with people?

Look at how they are around their interview questions. Do they create a warm environment? How do they great your staff when they walk in? Find out what your candidates are passionate about. Does this align with what you're looking for?

We utilize a 3rd party interviewing service (http://bhrspartners.com) to then chat with candidates. You'd be surprised what interviewees tell someone who's not the boss.

Lastly, create a project for them to complete before their in-person interview. The questions should be real examples of problems they'll encounter on the job. Here are some examples:

- How would you answer this customer question?

- How would you better handle phone support?

- How do we make sure we respond back to customers the same-day?

- How do we impress our customers?

Keep asking them why, how would they implement this, what would they have done differently. This will put pressure on the candidate and the ones that break/snap aren't a good fit.

Compare your notes with your original goals and move forward!

Try Printavo - https://www.printavo.com