Marketing Consultant

In order to screen for empathy, determine a person's philosophy of how angry customers should be handled. You're looking for signs that the candidate knows how to empathize with others, and that they can turn a terrible experience into a positive one.

Say that a good product should not result in customer complaints so products are always most important. If unexpected problems do occur, however, it is important to quickly resolve them.

Ideally, you should already know what to say here. Remember, your weaknesses must always be used to your advantage - nobody has any true weaknesses in interviews.

Your strengths could be that you are good at listening and always patient. A weakness should ideally be related to the role, such as sometimes being too helpful and providing more advice than a customer actually requested. Go on to say that you are careful to ensure that you concisely answer their questions.

Good answers are honest, but polite. The best answer is when the candidate explains how they understand that the pet peeve is their own personal downfall, and how they proactively avoid making this pet peeve a problem for others.

This is a good questions to ask to get the conversation flowing -- and to potentially identify candidates that don't share the same philosophy as you and your company. Asking candidates what their personal customer service philosophy or mission is is a good way to identify those who would be a good company culture fit -- and those who might not be.

Be prepared to give relevant facts and information about your previous jobs and any customer service experience. Make sure that your facts and figures are correct. This is the most important aspect of the customer service interview.

This is a way to determine if a candidate is driven or not. The most driven candidates have a sense of where they would like to be in the next few years. Less driven candidates will say things like "I just want to work at a fun place," or "I don't really know."

Provide the candidate with a poorly-written canned response (such as the last response you got from your cable company), and give the candidate a few minutes to rewrite it. Ask them what was wrong with the initial wording, and why they added the words that they did.

This is always a challenge to answer well. The interviewer wishes to see that you have done some research about the company. Mention the company’s values and mission as being in line with your personal attitudes and goals in life.

Talk about relevant experience, even if it was not a telephone service. Mention any job related to serving customers and interacting with clients. Speak about your ability to communicate with many customers each day while maintaining composure under a heavy workload and time pressure.

You would like to convey an attitude of willingness to help, friendliness and yet knowledgeable. Demonstrate your capability in handling problems efficiently. This can be done by way of some personal examples.

Hopefully I would have seen the license plate and we could find who they are and remind them that they forgot to pay. It is possible that it was an honest error and that the customer will return on his own to pay the bill.