Interview questions and answers for customer service representative call center

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Ready to see what radically personal customer service looks like? Sign up for a free demo with Gladly today.

In a post-COVID world, more and more businesses are opting to maintain fully remote teams, and this certainly extends to customer service roles. Whether you’re transitioning to a remote customer service team, or your support team is already remote, you’ll need to use strategic customer service interview questions to assess your candidates’ skills and ensure you’re hiring the right person.

Remote Customer Service Interview Questions

Below you’ll find a list of remote customer service interview questions that you should ask to gauge customer service skills, initiative, ability to work remotely, and management skills. These questions are great to ask when hiring for customer service agents or customer service representative, customer support members, customer service manager, and more.

Why Use Customer Service Interview Question Templates?

You should use templated customer service interview questions because it allow you to compare every candidate in an apples-to-apples way. When candidates answer the same questions, you can then compare how they responded and make an informed decision that has less hiring bias. Customer service interview question templates are also great if you have team members who are not used to the interview process because it provides them with a roadmap to follow.

Customer Service Interview Questions for Agents/Representatives Working from Home

• Tell me about your favorite job you’ve ever worked? Can you also share your least favorite?
• How do you ensure your home office is good working environment?
• Do you prefer working within a structured more working schedule or do you prefer more flexibility? Why?
• How do you keep yourself motivated while working remotely?
• Have you ever worked a remote customer service job? What did you find most challenging?

Behavioral Based Customer Service Interview Questions

• Describe a time where you had to deliver bad news to a customer.
• Tell me about a time where a customer had an issue that you were able to resolve. What was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time where you had to work with a difficult customer that needed to be routed to your manager. At what point did you decide they needed to be routed?
• Describe a time where an angry customer kept talking over you. How did you handle the situation? What was the outcome?
• Describe a time where you successfully up-sold a customer on an additional product or service.
• Can you tell me about a time where you were proud of the customer service you provided to a customer?
• Tell me about a situation where you were speaking to a customer who had already spoken to multiple representatives but was unable to get the help they needed. How did you handle this situation and what was the outcome?
• Can you tell me about a time where where there were major issues with your product or service, and you didn’t have all the answers for how to respond to customers. How did you approach each situation? What did you say to the customers?
• Can you describe a time where you had to deal with a higher than usual call volume? How did you manage each customer request?

[Read more: Call Center Training Quiz]

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General and Common Customer Service Interview Questions

• What does good customer service mean to you?
• What’s the best customer service you’ve ever received?
• What do you consider to be the most important skills when providing customer service?
• How do you ensure you maintain good communication with every customer?
• Tell me about a time where you received bad customer service? What did you learn from this?
• What about our company/or product makes you excited to work with us?
• Do you believe the customer is always right? Why or why not?
• How do you stay motivated if you have to deal with multiple angry customers in a single day?
• If you have never worked in customer experience, what makes you interested in this role?
• What do you do on a daily basis to improve the customer service experience?
• How would you describe the value of a customer agent’s role to the company?

[Read more: Customer Service Scenarios Test]

Customer Service Management Interview Questions

• How do you stay current on your industry trends and customer expectations?
• What do you consider most important when building a customer service department?
• What do you think are the most important qualities in a customer service agent or representative?
• Tell me about a customer care policy that you developed and implemented?
• How would your agents describe you as a manager?
• When managing remote customer service agents, how do you ensure they are all motivated and performing their jobs?
• How do you track performance of your department and each individual agent?
• Describe a time where you had to manage a team member who was underperforming?
• Have you ever implemented any technology or workflows to improve processes? What was it?
• What solutions have you created as a result of customer problems that you continuously encountered?
• How do you train and onboard new service agents?

Customer Service Technology Interview Questions

• What technology have you used to deliver the best customer experience?
• Are there any tools in particular that you prefer to use to interact with customers? Why?
• Have you ever used customer service software to manage the omnichannel experience?
• What is your preferred way to communicate with customers? Why?
• Do you know the differences between a ticket-centered system and a people-centered platform?
• What tools do you think are most important to provide modern customer experience?

Interview Questions About Call Center Experience

• What do you consider to be the primary responsibility of a call center agent?
• What do you think are the most important skills when working in a call center?
• What types of call center software have you worked with? What did you think about them?
• How do you respond to customers when they become abusive over the phone?
• Tell me about your experience working in a virtual call center?
• Why do you think you’ll thrive at our company?
• How has your performance been measured in the past?
• How do you measure good customer service?
• How do you handle negative feedback from customers?

Final Thoughts: Remote Customer Service Interview Questions

Finding the right customer service employees for remote roles, is more challenging than hiring for in-house. Using the above interview questions, you’ll be able to identify top performing remote customer service staff from agents to managers.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers.   Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences. 

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