What is Customer Service Orientation and how to assess it?

The age of technology has helped transform the world in many ways. One of the things it has done is create an abundance of options in the market, be it any product or service. So, how does a company distinguish itself and outmaneuver its competitors? There are several ways. The first is to ensure that your product or service offers better quality than its rivals. But what if the quality offered and price are the same? Good customer service can help a company establish its brand image. 

However, establishing a good customer experience does not mean only having a dedicated team to handle customer complaints. The company’s hiring policies should also reflect the commitment to providing a customer experience. A company can only make a good product or service if its workforce is dedicated to the cause and believes in giving the best customer experience.

With many options, customers now demand the best at the lowest price. This is why companies should now form a link between their recruitment strategy and customer service orientation. In industries like retail, hospitality, healthcare, tech support, and sales, where direct interaction with customers is frequent, customer service orientation can be the difference between the good, the better, and the best.

What is Customer Service Orientation?

Customer Service Orientation can be defined as a natural tendency or mindset of either an individual or an organization that prioritizes the customer’s needs over their satisfaction regarding a product or service. Customer service orientation is aimed at ensuring that no customer has a negative experience with a product and that if they do, the situation is resolved immediately and in a way that the customer is satisfied.

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Components of Customer Service Orientation 

Customer-Centric Mindset

A customer-centric mindset urges a company’s employees to think from the customer’s perspective. This helps them understand the customer’s plight, allowing them to handle complaints better. This mindset helps employees personalize the customer experience, helping build a long-term relationship that enhances the brand’s reputation through word-of-mouth publicity. The feedback and complaints received from the customers can be used to improve the product or service.

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Empathy and Understanding

Customer experience requires a company to have people with emotional intelligence on the job. A key component of emotional intelligence is empathy, which is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the feelings of others. In a customer service situation, being empathic helps in many ways, such as:

• Acknowledging the customer’s emotions
• Letting them know their feelings matter
• Responding in a way that shows you get it

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Proactive Problem Solving

No matter how good a product or service is, there are bound to be some problems or complaints that it will encounter. What separates good customer service from outstanding service is how proactive a customer service representative is at spotting the system’s inefficiencies before they arise. This requires anticipation of patterns or issues that are common and negatively affect the customer experience of the said product or service.

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Communication Skills 

Soft skills are a great asset for a person working in customer service, and communication is perhaps the best of them all. The core communication skills that a customer service representative must have are:

• Active Listening:  This includes allowing the customer to actively hear the customer with minimal interruptions and helping him with all the solutions that they can offer at that time.
• Clarity: Explaining the situation to the customer in a way that they understand everything.
• Positive Language: Use positive language that indicates helpfulness.
• The tone of Voice: Try to keep the tone of your voice respectful, calm, and friendly.

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Consistency and Reliability

Great customer service is all about providing a reliable and consistent customer experience. Being able to provide reliable service to every customer can greatly help a brand improve its reputation. This is why companies should have consistent guidelines for addressing the customer’s concerns. Doing so on a consistent basis helps the company become dependable, honest, and accurate.

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How to assess good Customer Service Orientation 

Behavioral Interviews

In behavioral interviews, the recruiters assess the candidates by asking them questions about their past experience in the workplace and trying to predict their future behaviors in certain situations. Behavioral questions analyze how an employee adapts to different situations. This is because not every day is the same, and a lot can go wrong in the workplace. And it is here that a candidate’s soft skills that might be totally unrelated to their work comes into play.

Behavioral Interviews include questions that assess things such as:

• Teamwork: How did you work with an employee who was less committed to the work than the entire team?
• Communication: Was there a time when you had to convince an entire team to change their view and ascribe to yours on a project?
• Adaptability: Tell me about a team when the company fired several of the workforce. How did you handle working at the company after these layoffs?

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Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)

These types of personality tests are designed to test how a person would react in certain situations. The aim is to simulate real-life scenarios to test a candidate’s response. The skills being measured are problem-solving, decision-making, and interpersonal skills. These tests allow an interviewer to see how candidates think and react to certain problems, which can indicate how they will perform in real-life situations.

In this scenario, companies should use job-specific SJTs to mirror the situations that could occur in day-to-day office environments. An example of such tests would be as follows:

If you were helping a customer who became increasingly angry because their issue hadn’t been resolved, what would you most likely do?

1. Remain calm, apologize, and escalate to a supervisor immediately.
2. Explain policies firmly to the customer to help them understand the limits.
3. Let the customer vent, empathize with their frustration, and work toward a solution.
4. End the call if the customer becomes abusive.

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Personality Assessments

Personality assessments are questionnaires prepared in an interview that gauge a candidate’s social skills, soft skills, etc. Basically, they measure the prospective employee’s personality, including how they handle difficult situations at work. While two employees could be equally talented, their personalities could be entirely different. And since a lot can go wrong in a workplace, how the two employees react to specific problems can greatly affect how their teams function.

Trait	Why It Matters
Empathy	Ability to understand and relate to customers’ feelings and perspectives.
Patience	Crucial for handling difficult or slow-paced customers without losing composure.
Agreeableness	Friendly, cooperative, and compassionate behavior.
Conscientiousness	Reliable, responsible, and detail-oriented—important for following up and accuracy.
Emotional Stability	Staying calm under pressure, not easily frustrated.
Extraversion	Sociable and outgoing—helpful in customer-facing roles.

There are several types of Personality Assessments as follows:

• Hogans Assessment 
• DISC Assessment 
• Caliper profile 
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• Gallup’s Clifton Strengths Assessment
• Big Five personality test

Also Read: What are pros and cons of Personality Tests in hiring?

Role-Playing Exercises

Another way to assess a good customer service orientation is to use role-playing exercises. In this scenario, the candidate is given a simulated customer interaction in which they have resolved the issue. The way they think, act, and communicate can help the recruiter assess how a candidate might respond in a real-life scenario.

Role-playing exercises helps measure the following:

Skill/Behavior	Why It Matters
Empathy	Can they genuinely relate to a frustrated or confused customer?
Problem-Solving Ability	Can they think on their feet and offer effective solutions?
Communication Skills	Are they clear, respectful, and professional in tone?
Composure Under Pressure	Can they stay calm and positive in a tense or emotional interaction?
Product Knowledge	Do they show understanding of the company’s services or policies?
Adaptability	Can they adjust their approach based on the customer’s personality or mood?

Example questions of role-playing exercises such as:

• Handle Complaints: A customer is angry about a billing error. Role-play how you would handle the situation.

Upselling: A customer is asking for an unavailable product. Recommend suitable alternatives and explain the benefits.

• Technical Support: The customer can’t log into their account. Guide them through troubleshooting.

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Reference Checks

The last step while recruiting for customer service orientation involves conducting reference checks on the candidates from their previous organization  These reference checkers are vital when hiring for customer service roles that greatly depend on personality, behavior, and interpersonal skills. So, a recruiter should contact a candidate’s former employers, managers, or colleagues to get an idea about their past behaviors and performance.

The things recruiter should look for in reference checks are:

• General Performance: How would you describe the performance of the candidate in their previous role?
• Soft Skills:  How did the candidate handle a situation where there were vast differences of opinion within their team?
• Team and Work Ethic: How did they perform in a situation where a big project needed to be finished on a tight deadline?
• Strengths & Areas to Improve: What are the strengths of the candidate, and what are the areas where they could improve?
• Rehire Question: Would you rehire the candidate if given the chance?

Also Read: What are pros and cons of Emotional Intelligence in hiring?

Customer service orientation is not a degree or skill but a personality trait developed over time. Therefore, a recruiter should do everything to assess candidates for customer service roles. This is where companies have adopted the latest technologies such as Interview as a Service (IaaS), and companies can be game changers.

With IaaS, companies can make the interview process not only faster but also more efficient. So, what does an IaaS do? You can think of it as a tool that acts as a virtual assistant to a recruiter at every step of the interview process. BarRasier is one such tool that has quickly become one of the best tools for making interviews better.

Before the interview, we integrated a bot into the company’s Application Tracker System (ATS). This bot helps the recruiter by creating a set of questionnaires. To do this, the recruiter simply types the role they are hiring for, the number of years of experience, the number of interview rounds, the duration of the Interview, and the number of parts that the Interview should be divided into.

Our AI Interview Copilot assists the interviewer by giving them timely guidelines during the interview. If the recruiter has run out of questions,, they can simply ask our tool to create a nones by going through the candidate’s resume or the context of the Interview (because the entire Interview is recorded and transcribed).

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After this, our AI Interview Copilot assists the interviewer by giving them specific instructions. For example, if the Interview exceeds the time limit, the AI bot will alert the recruiter to speed up the process. We are also committed to making our process as unbiased as possible. This is why our AI transcribes and records every Interview and immediately raises an alert if the recruiter uses language that might be considered discriminatory to the candidate. 

After the Interview, the AI asks the interviewer for a detailed review of the candidate. We believe that our tool is an assistant and not the decision maker, so it formulates answers only after receiving instructions from the interviewer. While this is happening, the AI is also creating another report that measures the recruiter’s effectiveness and performance. This report acts as a check and balance to ensure accountability for every stakeholder involved in the recruitment process.

Using BarRaiser, we guarantee quality hiring that will bolster diversity and inclusion. BarRaiser is the best AI interview platform, featuring structured interviews and tools to ensure quality hiring while eliminating recruitment bias. With BarRaiser’s support, you’ll be well-equipped to build a strong team of sales associates who will drive sales and deliver exceptional customer service.