Customer Complaint Officer Interview Preparation Guide

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This is not an invitation to ramble on. If the context isn't clear, you need to know more about the question before giving an answer.

Whichever direction your answer ultimately takes, be sure that it has some relevance to your professional endeavors. You should also refer to one or more of your key personal qualities, such as honesty, integrity, being a team player, or determination.

To answer this question you must have researched the company. Reply with the company's attributes as you see them and how your qualities match them.

This is often an opening question, as it allows you to use one of your strongest examples and may help you relax. For the interviewer, it is also an indication of where your natural focus or achievements may be - people development, process, cost reduction, change etc.

You are not required to be an expert on the organisation or role, but a genuine interest and basic understanding is expected. If you are working with a recruitment consultant then they should be able to provide you with extra details and assist with preparation.

In addition, look for and use press releases, corporate and social websites. Ring the call centre to see how they handle your call: do they offer 'up-sell', 'cross-sell', how was the service? Read the job description to prepare for this question, a few key facts or some knowledge show a genuine interest and commercial awareness.

Whilst more money, shorter hours or less of a commute are all potential factors for your next role, they are unlikely to make you the 'stand out' candidate of the day.

Know what the company are looking for and the potential job available, and align this with your career to date. Highlight your relevant experience, goals and aspirations in line with the role, to showcase why you are the best person for the job.

Try to think about how you would describe yourself if someone asked you for your strengths, then relate these to what people say about you; peers, agents, managers and stakeholders. Have three or four at the ready, ideally in line with the role you are being interviewed for. Have examples or situations ready, in case your interviewer wants to drill down as to why you think or believe these are your key strengths.

Here your potential employer is looking to see that you are capable of planning your time effectively.

They want to hear things like how you hold team meetings to discuss the week ahead and allocate time slots and deadlines for various projects.

As part of my regular team monitoring, I assess all advisors call quality in order to measure them against the relevant KPIs. When reviewing calls for one advisor, I noticed a trend where the advisor was quite abrupt with callers. I scheduled a meeting in private with that advisor, which I prepared for by reviewing supporting information (including their performance statistics for the month).

I adopted a supportive style as I raised my concerns with the individual regarding their approach with customers, and confirmed their awareness of the business expectations regarding excellent customer service. I sensitively discussed with them any reasons they felt they were unable to deliver this, and emphasised the balance which needed to be maintained between quality and quantity. I adopted a coaching style to enable the advisor to work through any barriers and identify solutions, agreed reasonable and tangible expectations for improvement, arranged appropriate support and scheduled weekly meetings to review their performance against these expectations. As a result, the advisor improved their performance and now consistently achieves all targets.

Here your interviewer wants proof that you will tackle problems head on and not just bury your head in the sand.

A strong answer will clearly demonstrate a problem, an action and a solution.

For example:

Problem: When I was first promoted to team leader, I consistently struggled to ensure that my team achieved their sales targets on a Friday.
Action: I sought the advice of more experienced team leaders to find out how they motivated their teams through the Friday slog.
Solution: Acting on the advice of the other team leaders, I implemented a combination of incentives over the next few weeks and successfully boosted my team's sales figures.

What you need to show here is primarily an understanding of the particular project management methodology. For example, 6 sigma or lean management.

You should do this by giving an example of a project that went well, and show some of the challenges that you had to overcome along the way.

In particular, it would be useful to show examples of how you managed to get the team on your side and sharing the same vision for success.

If you have no experience of these types of methodologies, you should just give an example of a project that you worked on that went well.