Customer Complaint Officer

As a leader or manager charged with delivering excellent customer feedback, you will know how important it is that customer feedback and insight are monitored, measured and acted upon, whenever appropriate or necessary.

But how about your agents? This question is very much aligned to your engagement, coaching and development skills. You need to think about the culture, communication and interactions you have with your agents.

Discuss how you impart your knowledge and experience to your agents and how you ensure that they can continue to develop the confidence, skills, knowledge and habits that will drive excellent customer feedback with every interaction.

This question is especially important if you are applying for a management position.

An ideal answer will demonstrate that you are capable of assessing a situation and implementing improvements.

For example:

I started to notice that a lot of customers were complaining about feeling patronised by my agents. In response to this, I listened to the calls these complaints stemmed from and realised that words such as 'wonderful' were being over used.

I then had a meeting with the worst offenders in my team and suggested changes that they could make to correct this behaviour. After this meeting, customer complaints reduced and sales increased.

This question is asked to determine whether or not you are going to bring something to the team.

In an ideal answer you will confirm that you are creative in your job role, and markedly so compared to some of your colleagues. You should then proceed to give examples which demonstrate this.

This question gives you the opportunity to tell the interviewer about how you developed a Monday-morning prize-giving incentive to get your team fired up for the week. Or how you introduced daily staff meetings to keep your team engaged with the goals of the organisation. Or implemented a buddy-up training programme to help your new recruits settle in faster.

The answer to this will depend on the job you're interviewing for and your experience.

I would recommend thinking about a specific instance and then discussing this in detail. Outline the process stage by stage and, if there are areas that need improvement, focus your answers on the solutions instead of the problems.

No matter what level we operate at, we are all able to lend our experience of success to our peers - we just have to be careful not to patronise or undermine them in the process.

When answering this question, make sure that you give an example that is truly constructive and had a positive outcome. This will show your interviewer that you understand how to help improve your colleagues' performance without hurting their feelings.

If possible, think work related. There will hopefully be a number of things you are most proud of in your career to date. Think about your key achievements; were they commercial, people or process orientated? What was the cause and effect? How were you involved, what was improved, saved or developed?

If you are short on career-based examples, use personal achievements which demonstrate the commercial skills required for the role, such as team work, commitment, empathy, determination, attention to detail, etc.

Morale is infectious - whether positive or negative - and, when working in a team-orientated environment like a call centre, it's important that there is always an air of positivity around.

It's therefore vitally important to ensure that if you're having a bad day, you contain this and don't let it influence the morale levels of the team, and in turn the productivity and efficiency of the overall operation.

Tread carefully with this question. Whilst the truth may be that you only get out of bed every morning in order to pay your rent, this is not what your potential employer wants to hear.

This question gives you an opportunity to discuss what has attracted you to this line of work and what inspires you to persevere through the tough times. In a sales role, this could be the adrenaline rush of meeting daily targets, whilst in a customer-service role, this could be the personal satisfaction you gain through helping people.

This is an opportunity for you to show off your research on the role and company.

Talk about the benefits the company has to offer and how they suit you at this point in your career. For example, if you are joining the company as a graduate, discuss how you plan to utilise their highly-structured training scheme.

Also comment on the company's reputation and try to make reference to a recent success you have seen on their website.

This question is set to test your ability to identify and analyse customer insight, trends and data, and drive continuous improvement, by identifying and understanding the root cause.

The interviewer will be looking for an example of where you have taken this insight and subsequently developed, implemented and improved your sales process. This could be through the introduction of training, post-sale procedures, a change in marketing communications, or other process improvements, to ensure that the cause of any future complaint is eradicated.

The answer to this really depends on the job/company you're interviewing for. However, it's a good idea to discuss your understanding of the company, processes, products, clients and the marketplace. As a sales team leader, you'll also be expected to deliver strong results against your personal sales and team targets.

This is a bit of a tricky question to answer, as how you answer can determine whether your interviewer thinks you are too strong-minded or, worse, too sheep-like in your approach to work. An ideal answer will show a degree of balance.

For example:

Throughout my term of employment, I keep a constant note of any areas that I feel can be improved. But I only present these concerns to my boss when I have developed in-depth and realistic solutions.

The frequency of these meetings is determined by how stable the company is. If the company implements several changes throughout the course of the year, I am more inclined to provide regular feedback to my boss.

This question requires you to understand the benefits of setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) objectives and developing action plans.

For example:

In line with the over-arching goals of the company, I would set personal goals for myself and my team which I would subsequently break down into weekly SMART objectives. I would monitor these closely through general in-office communication and a series of team meetings, as well as through scheduling individual appraisal meetings at 3, 6 and 12 month intervals.

Here your interviewer wants to see that you will bring something to their company and not just fade into the background.

Whilst this question does open the floor for you to recite how you once doubled your team's sales figures, employers are equally interested in hearing about how you have developed and maintained a strong professional network, or how you pride yourself on your reputation for being reliable and hard working.

Whatever you end up talking about, try to keep it short. You don't want your ego to get in the way of you being offered the job.

Only you will know if your team really trusts and respects you. Respectful employees will usually make you coffee, hold a door open for you, properly carry out tasks assigned to them and rarely undermine your judgement.

To maintain this level of respect, you should make time to recognise your employees' efforts, occasionally explain how you reached a solution to a problem (this can help with buy-in for larger changes or projects) and do your best to be consistently level-headed and successful in your judgement - as it only takes one slip-up to undermine your credibility.