How can your company become a leader in customer service delivery? It all begins with who is interacting with customers and their customer service capabilities. The best place to start when it comes to ensuring you have the right workforce in place to be a customer service leader is the recruitment and selection of your front line workforce. This blog is the second in a four part series where we are highlighting tactics you can use to establish a customer service culture that actually meets your expectations.

There are many factors that go into recruiting new talent and the process of finding the right candidate. Unfortunately, it is common to see shortcuts being taken and urgency taking over the hiring process. This leads to higher turnover and cost for the company. By taking more time and utilizing resources such as employee satisfaction and exit surveys you can create a more accurate job description, and establish fine-tuned interview questions relevant to the open position to ask potential candidates and dramatically reduce turnover and increase the quality of your workforce as a result.  Behavioral based questions can be used to evaluate a candidate’s customer service capabilities.

In terms of actual candidate interviews, one highly successful approach in the parking industry is Group Interviews. This approach has proven to be very successful toward hiring on both financial and strategic fronts. Because the sessions are highly interactive amongst the participants themselves, the forum encourages a much less formal dialogue where questions are asked and answered and in place are “real” conversations where applicants “true colors” are shown. The group activities also allow the Hiring Manager to play more of an observer role and provide time to evaluate what he/she is watching, in the moment, as opposed to after the candidate has left.

What are some of your ideas for cracking the code of establishing a customer service culture? Share them with us here, and tune in next week for the third installment in this series where we will talk about the role onboarding and classroom training play in customer service delivery.

Are you interested in more information about customer service training or recruitment? uDrive subscribers have access to tools and templates that can help. These can be found in the Resources for the Parking Manager and Recruitment sections of the site.