Interview Skills and Tips: Ready to be the stand-out candidate at your next call centre job interview?
Join us, Bob and Jeremy of Reality Training, where we promise to equip you with the exact insights and strategies you need to impress any interviewer, regardless of their role or seniority.
We share key tips on demonstrating your understanding of sales and service, maintaining a positive attitude in challenging times, and how to show that you've done your homework about the company.
We look at why you need to explain you understand selling and discuss how to convey your eagerness and curiosity to master the art of selling. We explore the importance of having a positive mindset, especially during tough times, and provide ways to illustrate your determination.
As a bonus, we act out an engaging scenario of interviewing at a company that sells car batteries to show how it's done.
Listen now and nail your next contact centre interview with confidence!
Find more useful and essential contact centre development from realitytraining.com
Interview Skills and Tips: Ready to be the stand-out candidate at your next call centre job interview?
Join us, Bob and Jeremy of Reality Training, where we promise to equip you with the exact insights and strategies you need to impress any interviewer, regardless of their role or seniority.
We share key tips on demonstrating your understanding of sales and service, maintaining a positive attitude in challenging times, and how to show that you've done your homework about the company.
We look at why you need to explain you understand selling and discuss how to convey your eagerness and curiosity to master the art of selling. We explore the importance of having a positive mindset, especially during tough times, and provide ways to illustrate your determination.
As a bonus, we act out an engaging scenario of interviewing at a company that sells car batteries to show how it's done.
Listen now and nail your next contact centre interview with confidence!
Find more useful and essential contact centre development from realitytraining.com
Speaker 1:
Contact Center Focus the reality training podcast. Hello and welcome to Contact Center Focus. This is Bob and Jeremy of Reality Training, and today we're going to be looking at interview tips. Now, when you're going for a job in a contact center, you will be meeting team leaders, sales managers, heads of recruitment, people who work in HR, and they're all going to be looking for different things from their prospective candidates, and we're going to give you some top tips that we know are going to help you stand out because there may well be more than one of you and also give you the best chance of getting the job you're after. Jeremy, tell us a bit about the interview process.
Speaker 2:
Well, I think what's important is we could cover loads and loads of tips, and what was really important there, when you were listening in the first intro from Bob, is different departments will require different things, but we have honed in on three things that, regardless of department and, in many ways, regardless of level of seniority or even role of the person who carries out the interview, these will impress. So we're going to kick off with number one, which is prove you understand sales and service and that, particularly, you know how to sell. And one of the ways you can do this is do some research into a sales structure so that you clearly understand that calls should begin with powerful greetings, strong openings, strong agendas, excellent open questioning, checking details, putting forward a proposition, handling objections, negotiating, closing, cementing, wrapping, whatever it may be. That you absolutely understand, even as a linear process, that you explain it, that you understand the different phases of a customer journey and that you will be somebody who can understand how to sell Anything to add to that.
Speaker 1:
Now, if you are able to research that sort of thing and come up with some sort of a structure, that's great. It may be that, as a new employee, you've never done anything like this before. So if you don't have a sales structure, what you can do is talk about how fascinated you are by selling and what makes people buy and how people are persuaded to buy things, and that's what you want to learn more about, because you know it's a really interesting form of interaction and it is and I think that's a nice thing for prospective employers to think OK, here's someone here who's really curious about the world of selling and that's somebody that we can use and mould and develop them to the type of salesperson we need them to be.
Speaker 2:
Huddles and buzz sessions. Please use these short podcasts to train, coach and inspire your people. Reality Training specialise in change programmes that improve the working lives of contact centre people everywhere. Find out more about our work at realitytrainingcom.
Speaker 1:
So that brings us on to number two. Now number two is, you would think, fairly obvious, but to some people it isn't. You've got to be able to demonstrate that you have a positive attitude. You're going to be working long hours in the contact centre and some of those hours will be filled with good times when you're making sales and chatting to your teammates and having successful commercial period. And some of those times will be long hours with no sales and not many people biting and a lot of frustration. And your prospective employer is going to want to see you are able to come through those periods with a very positive attitude. Anything to add, jeremy?
Speaker 2:
Well, some kind of story. So let's just say you've left school at 16 and you've gone to college and you prove that at one point college work was particularly hard for you. You turned it around. It could be a team you've been in, maybe a sports team. You weren't picked, you were dropped. You stayed practising. You got back in the team, Something that shows perseverance and a positive attitude. Don't just say I'm really positive. Actually give a story of something in your life that proves you have been steadfast, maintain the distance. Number three, which is possibly my personal favorite, which I'm hoping you're not thinking of, so this becomes more valuable to you. Let's just say I want to go and join Bob's company and he runs a contact center and you sell Bob, I've already decided. You know what you sell. What do I sell? Car batteries.
Speaker 1:
Okay.
Speaker 2:
You sell car batteries direct to consumers who want to fit their own in a growing world of people fitting their own car batteries, and you also sell to garages anybody. But you've got a range of batteries and I'm going to be in the interview now.
Speaker 1:
Well, jeremy, thanks very much for coming into Sears today and explaining us about your keenness to do this job, and as you know we are seeing lots of other people for roles like this at the moment. Is there anything that you'd like to add following everything that we've discussed so far?
Speaker 2:
Well, I think what I've left you with is my keenest sell. I hope you appreciate that story of what happened to me at 16. Yeah and I turned around.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, this is one more thing I haven't told and I've saved it till now. So I've got a fort fiesta and I rang in yesterday morning to buy my own battery from one of your team, and I've got three things that I think they do brilliantly, but I've also got two that they haven't done to me. Now I'm 21. And I thought I could share that with you now. So I've customer checked you, I've kind of gone through the misty shopping experience and I can share back with you the insight I have.
Speaker 1:
Amazing, that sounds really interesting.
Speaker 2:
Has anyone else done that in an interview?
Speaker 1:
No, they haven't.
Speaker 2:
Okay, good, good.
Speaker 1:
Now, what's he done here, Ladies and gents? What he's done is he has come up with an idea. Now that idea may not be much, maybe brilliant, it doesn't matter. The fact is he's made some effort to make contact, to come up with something creative which is showing his enthusiasm, but also his interest in the work and also his initiative initiative, and that's really important as well, and that's a standout thing that you would find in an interview which not everybody will do.
Speaker 2:
Great. So, to summarize, get across the fact you either understand selling to some degree or you're really keen to get into it and learn it. The second thing you've got a PMA, a positive mental attitude, and you persevere and connect a real life story to that. And thirdly, check out the company and go in with an idea.
Speaker 1:
So those are our three current interview tips for call centers and contact centers. We'll be doing more on this subject in due course, but in the meantime, best of luck with your next interview.