Nail Your Customer Service Job Interview: Essential Questions & Tips

This comprehensive guide will help you ace your next customer service job interview, whether you're the hiring manager or the candidate. We'll cover the key questions to ask and answer, provide tips on how to impress during the interview, and offer insights into what employers are looking for.

• We'll explore the most common customer service job interview questions, covering topics like problem-solving, career aspirations, and handling customer issues.
• You'll discover how to effectively answer these questions, demonstrating your skills and passion for customer service.
• From both perspectives, we'll delve into the mindset of the interviewer and the candidate, providing valuable insights into how to navigate a customer service job interview.

For Hiring Managers: Effective Customer Service Interview Questions

As a hiring manager, you're looking for more than just technical skills. You want to find individuals who genuinely understand and value excellent customer service.

• Remember that not every question is about surface-level information. It's about giving a candidate the opportunity to demonstrate a particular skill or highlight a relevant experience.
• Don't just ask questions and see which candidate "strikes" you with a funny anecdote or a sly smile. Make it your goal to seek out specific traits that make them well-suited for the customer service role.

Typical Job Interview Questions (Tailored for Customer Service)

These typical job interview questions can be adapted to assess a candidate's customer service skills and approach.

• Can you think of a problem that needed solving at a previous position that you were able to solve? What was your process for doing that?
• This question is a great way to see how candidates approach problem-solving in a customer service context. Look for a clear and defined system they have in place.
• Rather than just saying, "Well, I just tried my best and eventually we got it solved," you should look for specifics. Does the candidate appear to have any personal systems they put in place that help them approach customer service systematically? This indicates competence and forethought.
• For applicants: Think about a specific example—keyword, specific—before you go into the interview. Always ask yourself: what is this story saying about me?
• Where do you see yourself in five years?
• On one hand, it's important to know where a job candidate's ambitions are. If they don't care about customer service and see themselves doing something else five years from now, that's important information to know.
• But you also need to know if they have passion for customer service. If they give a different answer, but they still talk about helping people, that's a passion that can still overlap with your job. Look for answers that demonstrate that they care about people, and not just about themselves and their five-year plans.
• For applicants: Think less about your own life and more about your professional goals. Try to be specific when possible, but don't say "I'd like to make XYZ money." Instead, get specific about your role in customer service, or your goals for career advancement.
• Are there any failures you can remember? What would you do differently about those in the future?
• It's important that a candidate understands that failures will happen. The most important thing you're searching for is a candidate's ability to take criticism and learn from previous mistakes.
• Ideally, the candidate will give you more insight than "well, I learned not to do that again." But that's certainly a valid response, depending on the context. Look for candidates who at least have a healthy attitude toward adapting their processes in the face of failure.
• For applicants: Choose a real failure; not necessarily an embarrassing catastrophe, but a failure that made you stronger in the end. It's better to be memorable here than to give a watered-down answer, as long as you can demonstrate a willingness to change.
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• What you're looking for here aren't necessarily the strengths and weaknesses themselves, although those can be informative.
• What you're really testing for is self-evaluation and a willingness to expand and grow.
• On the other hand, if a candidate were to tell you that they have great technical skills, but that it took them a while to learn how to function in a team environment at their last job, that tells you something. It tells you that they saw a weakness and embraced change, and that they were willing to share that vulnerability with you.
• For applicants: Choose a real weakness, but give specifics about how you resolved it to show your ability to evolve.

Customer Service-Oriented Interview Questions

These specific customer service interview questions will help you assess a candidate's understanding of customer service principles and their approach to interactions.

• What does customer service mean to you?
• A vague, open-ended question. What kind of value can you possibly get out of it? Well, for starters, you'll get a sense of what kind of confidence the candidate might have. If they know for certain what customer service means to them, then it means they've already given it a lot of thought. If they don't, it's possible they haven't.
• What you want to look for are values that align with your own customer service priorities. Do they sound like they'll mesh with the way your company approaches customer issues?
• For applicants: Don't be generic here. Talk about a specific story in which customer service impacted your life. Did a company do something great for you once?
• What is your favorite method of communicating with customers?
• With this question, you should try to suss out whether this candidate is a good fit for your specific role. For example, if they talk a lot about their strong written communication skills, then putting them on the telephone might not be a good idea.
• This is a specific question, and you'll be looking for specific answers that can change depending on the type of role you have. At the very least, you can learn a little bit about their preferences to see where they might be a fit, if the job interview is more open-ended.
• For applicants: Be honest about your preferences, but indicate a willingness to learn if the job is about something else.
• What does good customer service mean to you?
• Another vague and open-ended question, but it helps assess if the candidate understands the importance of customer service in the growth of a company.
• Do they understand how every customer interaction matters, or do they simply talk about vague notions about solving customers' problems? There's nothing wrong with the latter. However, the former can say a lot about their understanding of customer service in a leadership context.
• For applicants: Talk about an individual story, or mention your philosophy. What is the key principle guiding your customer service? If you don't have a specific answer, they may wonder how seriously you take it.

For Candidates: Powerful Questions to Ask in Your Customer Service Job Interview

Turning the tables and asking insightful questions demonstrates your seriousness about the position and your desire to learn more about the company and the role.

• What metrics about my job performance will you be using in future evaluations?
• This is essential in customer service interviews, because different companies may have different ways of evaluating you. Will they put more weight toward customer feedback surveys? Is it more sales-oriented? Are you judged by how many products you can upsell, or by how many positive reviews they get from people you talked to?
• This isn't only an impressive question to ask, but it's an important one for you to know. Remember on the first day of class, when teachers would give out a syllabus and tell you exactly how you'd be graded?
• When you break it down, you'll know exactly how you can do a good job for them. And prospective employers love to hear that you care about their metrics.
• What sort of career path is available to someone in this position?
• This isn't only essential information for you, but it tells the employers that you're not just viewing this as another job.
• Remember: many of these questions are about the subtext just as much as their literal meaning.
• On the literal level, this question is about career advancement. But the subtext is that you're a serious professional looking to expand your skills and potentially stick around with the right company. That's something a lot of companies value; they don't want to constantly hire people, but many companies look to grow talent from within.
• What is it like to work here?
• This one is less about impressing them and more about getting yourself a hint of what would happen if you were to be hired. It's your life, after all. You should enjoy your work environment. If the interviewers hem and haw about the company and clearly seem to be hiding something, you can take that as a potential red flag. But if they seem excited to share their experiences with you, you can probably bet that you're going to feel as excited talking about your job, too.

How to Maximize Your Time On a Job Interview

It's important to make the most of your time in a customer service job interview, showcasing your best qualities and demonstrating your commitment to the role.

• Devote most time to specific anecdotes
• Think in terms of storytelling. You're not just at a job interview; you're telling the story of your success. When going through fifty different interviews, hiring managers are going to glaze over if they have to hear another generic spiel about how excited the candidate would be for the opportunity.
• It's too bland. Eventually, the hiring managers just hear trumpet sounds, as if you were an adult in one of those Peanuts cartoons.
• You can tell people some generic things about your skills. But remember it's far more important to prepare a real-life anecdote that demonstrates your qualities as well.
• It's one thing to say "I'm a quick learner." It's another thing to tell the story of your last job, when you had a great attitude but zero technical experience, and you were able to get started with the company CRM within a week, and within two weeks, you were teaching other people how to use it.
• Do most of your preparation around the most common interview questions
• You know that interviewers are going to ask specific questions—they all do—so it only makes sense to devote much of that preparation to what you know you can answer.
• That means taking the time to prepare real stories. Think about your strengths and weaknesses. Find a weakness you had that fits our guidance above, and then learn how to explain it in a way that shows a willingness to change.
• Even if an interviewer asks you a curveball question, the kind of preparation you do for the other questions should still give you something of a blueprint for handling them.
• Be willing to say “I don’t know” rather than bury yourself looking silly
• Let's say an interviewer gives you a tough question to react to. You don't know much about it, and you're afraid of looking bad.
• You talk in circles around that question. You go on and on. And all the interviewer can think is, "Gee, is this how it's going to be to work with them?" That's not ideal.
• Instead, consider telling them that you don't know. Be blunt, even. Matter-of-fact. Professional, but straightforward.
• "You know, I don't know the answer to that as well as I should. So I don't want to pretend I do. But I'll bet you I can learn."
• That's someone you might want to work with, isn't it? Someone who doesn't obfuscate when they don't know something? Someone who doesn't pretend to be someone they're not?

Making the Most of Your Customer Service Job Interview

In customer service, you're expected to have people skills. Every question you answer is a demonstration of that fact. If you don't prepare—and don't know how to answer—you're simply demonstrating that you don't take the job seriously.

But if, on the other hand, you prepare for the interview the same way you might train for customer service, you'll find it's not nearly as hard as you think to impress them.