As you hire for your customer service team, look for the following characteristics in each candidate:
Excellent communication skills
Communication is key. If you had to pick only one trait to consider when hiring, this is the one. That's why the interview process should include a lot of opportunities to communicate with the candidate and is one of the simpler traits to spot. If an applicant struggles to convey their thoughts to you, it’s probably a safe bet they’ll have trouble doing the same with customers. While customer service training can help with communication details and the nuances of language that help a support interaction go well, the most basic communication between two people is difficult to train into someone.
To assess communication skills in relation to your product or service, why not ask the candidate to explain a piece of it to you, as if you’re a potential customer starting from zero? If they can break down the subject into understandable, helpful tips for you in the moment, chances are they can do that for your customers too.
Experience in customer support
Experience in customer support of a similar product or service isn’t totally necessary, but some history of providing customer service in general is great to have. While you can train a person on the details of your particular product, it’ll be easier to do if they’re starting out with an understanding of how to deal with customers and general best practices when providing support.
As you assess a candidate’s customer support experience, ask them for an example of a time they dealt with a difficult customer or a time they advocated for a customer and how it went. If they share a story that sounds reasonable—whether a positive interaction or not—it’ll show they’ve faced difficulty in support or gone the extra mile for a customer, as well as their ability to reflect on their work.
Understanding your company’s product or service
Pay attention to whether or not a candidate appears to have customized their application materials for you in particular, or if it's so generic it feels like it could've been sent to anyone. Ideally, they should create documents specifically for you by including relevant details and connecting them to why they're a good fit for your organization.
As you consider a candidate through their submitted documents, assess whether they seem to really know what you do and how they feel about it. Does the way they speak about your product make sense? Are there any particular mentions about recent feature rollouts or content your team has created around your product? If they're passionate about your work or helping people using your product, that'll go a long way in guaranteeing a dedicated, enthusiastic customer support representative.
Strong people skills
Any member of your customer service team should also possess strong people skills. To be a successful member of the team, they’ll need to be skilled at collaborating with team members, as well as developing and maintaining positive, professional relationships with people across your organization.
As you discuss your team’s culture and internal communication style, pay attention to the questions the candidate asks. Are they curious about how people work together and the tools you use? Do they have ideas for how they’d do it or examples of similar experiences in the past? Simply put, it may be worth it to ask them directly for their thoughts on how your team works together and if they can see themselves fitting into that set up too.