How to Spot Top Talent for Customer roles
Essential skills, behaviours and attributes
This post will tell you about some of the must-have skills for operators in the Customer Experience, Customer Success or Customer Management space. These are critical to ensure positive and successful outcomes, yet rarely asked about in interviews.
Have you ever recruited someone into a role who blew you away during the interviews, only to find out that once in the role they couldn’t execute without a team behind them?
Or perhaps you’ve sat through an interview process with a candidate who you knew would outperform in the role, but painfully stumbled throughout the interview.
Whilst interviews aren’t perfect tool, they still remain the most practical and best option available to assess someone’s suitability for a role.
In my personal experience — both as a hiring manager and a co-interviewer — there can sometimes be a lack of connection between the questions that candidates are being asked versus the practical skills, experience and attributes that are going to determine whether the person will do a good or great job once in the role.
Why does this happen and what can hiring managers do differently?
Whilst structured interviews and competency-based questions are helpful to ensure a fair and objective process, the skills that are being assessed tend to be quite high-level, generic and broad (e.g. leadership, teamwork, communication).
This is where a “technical interview” is meant to come into play to drill down into specific experiences and know-how (e.g. tell me about a time when you…. delivered a customer service improvement). Adding on structured questions and STAR answer techniques (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and answers will become more factual and specific. This approach is helpful to filter out those candidates who are good talkers but keep answers fluffy and nebulous.
A further dimension which I feel is missing — difficult to assess in practice — relates to the fact that the fields of CX, customer success, customer value management etc are not just a mix of art and science, but also a business philosophy.
I am yet to meet someone who tells me that they are not customer-focussed and customer service-minded, although there is a big difference between saying and doing something.
In my personal opinion, I’ve found that high-performers in ‘Customer’ related fields possess the following 5 key skills, experiences and attributes; areas which are not typically not probed into enough during selection processes.
1. Resourcefulness
Ability to overcome obstacles and find solutions with limited available resources. Resourcefulness is about making the best out of a situation and coming up with something useful; even in situations when your allocated budget might be zero.
❌ Needs a team around him/her to turn ideas into operational reality. Relies on bigger budgets and more FTE to grow scale and reach.
✅ Able to work with existing resources and does more with less. Finds ways of achieving impact through simple, effective and often ‘free’ solutions.
2. Customer obsession
Everybody seems to be customer-first and customer-led these days, so we need to look for people who are next-level and can ‘walk the walk’ as well as talk the talk.
❌ Listens in to customer phone calls and speaks to customer service staff once a year in a ‘Back-to-the-Floor’ exercise and posts a photo on LinkedIn about it.
✅ Seeks out interactions with customers proactively and embeds service/operations staff thinking in commercial decision-making and wider strategy development. Puts customer needs above everything else and uses complaints as a source of learning.
3. Zoomability
NOT the amount of time spent on Zoom calls! Rather, the ability to switch scope and assess a situation from a ‘helicopter view’ as well as getting into the details with a ‘microscope view’. In practice, this includes the skill-set of working effectively across different teams and environments (Strategy vs Operations).
❌ Can only work at a strategic level, or can only work at an operational level. Rarely leaves HQ. Direct interactions with real customers is something that other people do.
✅ Ability to create customer strategies and tactics which are operationally feasible. Vice versa, possesses an ability to understand and improve operational processes and come up with ideas to improve these and turn them into strategic insights.
4. Visionary
Defines a clear vision for customer experience and outlines the aspiration of higher standards which are ‘authentic, clear, realistic’ and last but not least, measurable.
❌ Focusses exclusively on one type of activity, e.g. continuous improvement activity (e.g. 1% marginal improvements) or technological innovations. Delivers stand-alone initiatives without an overarching strategy or coherent storyline.
✅ Crafts an inspiring customer-centric vision that aligns with business goals, and incorporates both continuous improvements and technological innovations within the overall roadmap.
5. Organisational chameleon
Whilst CX and Customer Value Management are important functions in a company, the reality is that such specialist departments will never carry the same budgets as a Sales or Marketing team. Therefore, operating in tandem with other stakeholders and delivering through other teams is a key skill for operators in this space.
❌ Operates independently and separately from other business teams and outside of the main company roadmap. Activities are peripheral and considered ‘nice-to-have’.
✅ Incorporates customer-led thinking across company-wide activities, processes and governance. Embeds themselves within other departments and projects to disseminate best customer practice. Influences, educates and builds up delivery momentum through the support of others to achieve the overall customer vision.
That concludes today’s newsletter - I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful! Any questions or comments, please feel free to ask and let me know your thoughts.
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