Enjoy!

CMS has evolved over the years and so has our marketing. This shot showcases some of our original phone book and Yellow Page advertisements that we’ve put out over the years.

Examples of an older model telephones.

This is a bank of PRI/T1 interface cards that we used to utilize for bringing in DS0 voice channels. Each card handled 24 channels, 23 of which were used for voice communications (B, or bearer channels) and the 24th, called the D (data) channel, which handles call control and signaling.

Two more examples of older telephones.

This is a 4 line switchbox (cord board) that you could connect up to 4 extensions off of. No it’s not a toy, but it sure looks like one.

This shot showcases another of our original advertisements along with an old-style handset receiver.

A large cord board (telephone switchboard, or manual exchange) that would connect groups of telephones to an outside line.

In this guide, I will show small business owners how easy it is to set up their own customer service call center and benefit from the professional level of service typically reserved for more established organizations. By employing a call center to handle some of your calls, you can ease your personal customer service responsibilities, run your business better, make your customers happier, and save a lot of money in the process.

First things first: You aren’t running a call center, you’re hiring one

This statement is true for large organizations and start-ups alike. Unless you have the resources and skills necessary to run your own call center, it’s best to seek out an established company to provide service on your behalf.

There are countless companies providing answering services for small businesses, companies that exist solely to provide telephone customer service for other organizations.

There are plenty of reasons why outsourcing the call center aspect of customer service makes sense:

1. Call center equipment is expensive. It may be easy to have one person set up in your office to take calls, but once you need to include call routing, scripting, integrated software, and call distribution, it quickly becomes more sophisticated. Established call centers have this all taken care of.
2. Hiring employees is costly and time consuming. If you hired an assistant to take your customer service calls, there’s a good chance you would pay him or her more in one day than it would cost you to use a call center for a month.
3. Managing a call center takes skills you don’t have. Handling call volume, staffing, quality assurance, software customization, etc. – these are things call centers deal with every day.
4. You’re best at running your business. As the above points indicate, it takes a lot to run a call center. You’re doing what you do because you’re good at it, so taking time away from your core responsibilities has a direct impact on your business performance. Handing this work off to another company allows you to stay focused.

So find a company that has experience working with small businesses, preferably experience with businesses in your niche, and enlist them to operate your customer service call center.

Next: Customize the service and make sure it meets your customers’ needs

Here is where a lot of businesses mess up. Not taking the time to make sure your new call center actually works for your business is a recipe for disaster.

If you send your callers to a call center that is unprepared, you’re going to be the next example of customer service outsourcing gone wrong.

You can’t treat the vendor as a separate company who is solely responsible for meeting your customers’ needs. That isn’t their job. Their job is to perform your customer service processes in a more cost-effective and professional manner.

The key word in that last sentence is “your”; they’re performing your customer service processes. So before you can use them effectively you need to know what your customer service processes are and ensure they address the issues faced by your customers.

If you run a small computer repair business and callers are constantly checking the status of their repair, then you should have a system in place for keeping track of job statuses. With that system in place, you can easily make it available via the web so that your customer service call center can access it. Just like that, they’re performing a simple task that you would normally be doing in your office.

Another example is appointment scheduling. If you have clients calling you to schedule appointments, don’t hire a call center just to take a message; use a cloud calendar system and give your call center access, allowing them to schedule appointments for you based on your availability.

The above examples can be summarized as follows:

1. Set up systems ahead of time that address the types of calls and inquiries you receive
2. Work with your call center to integrate the systems into their operation

There’s certainly tweaking that needs done in order to get things right, but repeating the above steps for the different situations that arise will ensure your call center remains in line with the rest of your business.

Lastly: Take time to listen and refine

While it is ideal to set up your call center and let it go, it would be irresponsible not to check in and make sure things are running as planned. You owe it to yourself, to your customers, and to your call center to do your part in ensuring the success of your customer service operation. By listening to calls, getting feedback from customers, and working with your vendor to make improvements where necessary, you can continually improve the effectiveness of your call center.

And there you have it, you’re on your way to providing professional customer service like the big boys. Hopefully you find this guide helpful in your efforts to improve your business and better serve your customers. By treating a call center as an extension of your business and partnering with them to meet your objectives, you’ll find their services extremely worthwhile.

If you have any questions regarding the process or how a call center can work with your business, I would be happy to talk with you about it. Same goes if you have worked with a call center in the past. Learning about what works and what doesn’t helps me improve and I’m always available to chat.

Establishing a business phone system and employing staff to answer calls has traditionally been a pretty costly endeavor. There’s the need to choose a service provider, purchase and setup equipment, configure voicemail boxes, determine when and how different calls are handled – and that’s just the phone system. Rather than spend the time and money to get these details in order, small business owners often choose to avoid the process altogether. These business owners end up opting instead for their existing phone line or, even worse, sending callers to a generic voicemail box.

Though the desire to avoid additional costs is understandable, the unintended consequences of this approach can be more costly. Customers expect their calls to be answered live. A recent Consumer Reports article listed voicemail as the number one customer service annoyance. How your business comes off on the phone matters and being able to professionally handle your calls is a simple way to set yourself apart from the competition.

How Google Voice and a Live Answering Service Can Help

Established in 2009 by Internet giant Google, Google Voice is a telecommunication service that provides users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to multiple existing lines simultaneously (such as a cell phone and landline). Besides providing a free number, the service also allows for free calls and SMS messages within the US and Canada, voicemail transcripts, online access, and a slew of other features. In short, Google helps you to cut out the headaches and costs associated with setting up a secondary business line while allowing you to enjoy all of the benefits.

A live telephone answering service is the second part of the equation. Obtaining a free phone number is great, but if all you do is forward that line to a cell phone or voicemail box, you haven’t done much to improve your business. By forwarding your Google Voice number to a telephone answering service instead, you gain access to professionally trained operators who answer in the name of your business, follow predefined business processes, and help give you the appearance of a much larger organization.

There are costs associated with utilizing an answering service, but they’re minuscule compared to those associated with hiring full time receptionists or providing sub-par customer service. Customers may never forget a negative phone experience.

At CMS, for example, answering service packages are billed in per-second increments, allowing you to pay only for the time our agents spend working on your behalf. Compare this to an employee who is paid by the hour whether or not they spend any time answering the phone or doing any work, and you quickly see how cost effective outsourcing your calls can be.

How to Make It Work for Your Business

Establishing an account with Google Voice and choosing your number is the first step, and it’s incredibly easy. All you have to do is travel to their website and create a Google account (if you use Gmail or any other Google services, you already have one). Once that’s completed and you have chosen a telephone number, your account is ready to start taking calls. Since it can take a week or so to establish service with a call center, you’ll want to record a voicemail greeting in the name of your business and temporarily forward the number to another active line. If you skip this step and move straight to advertising your number, you won’t know when you’re receiving a call and callers will be stuck with voicemail.

Setting up service with an answering service is just as easy, but it generally takes a bit more time. The reason for this is that the best services strive to work as an extension of your business, and doing so requires an understanding how you operate. If you’re a start-up and aren’t sure how you operate yet, that’s fine – established companies like CMS have plenty of experience and can help you design a service that meets your needs.

Together with the answering service representative setting up your account, you’ll determine how different calls will be handled, what information will be gathered, what processes the service will be responsible for, and the manner in which they’ll communicate with you.

To make an answering service truly work for your organization, it’s worth taking the time to customize their processes to match how you would ideally like to handle things in your office. By setting up your service in this fashion, you ensure that your callers receive a personalized experience that accurately reflects how you do business.

Once your answering service account is ready to go, all you need to do is forward your Google Voice number to the number the service provides to you. At CMS we refer to this as the call-forwarding or DID number, and it’s what our call center system uses to identify calls as belonging to a specific client. When your line is forwarded, any call made to your Google Voice number will come to one of our representatives, who will handle the call as specified during your initial account set up. That means you can promote your new number as a business line and rest assured that it will be answered professionally every time, regardless of when someone may call. If you don’t want to use the answering service all the time, you can easily switch back and forth between their call forwarding number and another number you use to take calls.

Conclusion

Combining the powerful features of Google Voice with a professional, customer service oriented answering service allows small businesses to escape the limitations of their size and provide callers with a truly rewarding telephone experience. While there will always be larger competitors with more resources, taking advantage of these two cost-effective tools is an easy way to level the playing field.

For more information about Google Voice, see http://voice.google.com. To learn more about telephone answering services from CMS, contact us anytime online or call 800-369-8908 to speak with a member of our team.

If you have any feedback on Google Voice and answering services for small businesses, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

This is one of our staff’s favorite business quotes. It says so much with so few words. All businesses, regardless of the services they provide or the products they sell, are in the communication business.

Because of its importance, we have decided to launch a blog series dedicated to modern business communication. The series will share some of our experience in the customer service arena, highlight different methods for effective communication, and introduce new tools and services that businesses may find useful.

Though we have more than four decades of experience in the telephone answering and customer service outsourcing business, we’re still learning a lot ourselves. The fact is, the Internet has changed everything, and the communication demands of today are far different than they were just a few short years ago. So besides sharing the wisdom and technology we are already aware of and utilizing on a daily basis, we’re also hoping to use this series to learn more about effective online communication, sharing what we find useful with other businesses along the way.

Unless you have absolutely no competition, how well your staff communicates with potential clients, vendors, and customers directly affect your business’s success. Every single communication your staff has is an opportunity to grow and strengthen your business. Unfortunately, those communications can also be an opportunity to hurt your business.

And how your business communicates is more than just your staff’s communication with customers. Customers have more options for communicating with your business or about your business than ever before and how you represent yourself through those mediums has an effect on their decision to do business with you. Customers can reach out to your business through the phone, e-mail, social media, and your website. Ask yourself the following:

• Does our website truly reflect our business’s message?
• Does our staff communicate our message properly through e-mail?
• What do people think about our business?
• Are we reaching potential customers through the mediums the prefer to communicate through?
• Are we shutting ourselves out for potential new customer’s because we don’t communicate with them through their preferred communication methods?
• How is our online reputation?
• Do all of our customer’s buying decisions happen during business hours?

These are important questions, and we’re hoping our blog series can help you address them. Obviously we are going to tie our series into the services we provide, but we are hoping the information we share will be helpful regardless whether you do business with us. Over the next few blogs we are going to be addressing the ways that customers communicate and how businesses can embrace new technologies to maximize business opportunities. Here is the link to our first post:

Google Voice and Live Answering Services: Leveling the Playing Field for Small Business

We considered two approaches:

1. Stick with Joomla, our existing content management system, and use the K2 component for blogging purposes
2. Use WordPress within a sub-directory

The easiest and obvious choice was to use Joomla with K2. Joomla was already installed and powering the rest of our website, so installing K2 for our blog would have been an easy process. Beyond the easy configuration, K2 would use our Joomla template and require very little (if any) additional styling.

If you aren’t familiar with K2, it’s a content extension for Joomla that dramatically enhances the control you have over your content. It comes pre-packaged with comment and tagging functionality, two critical blog features that Joomla lacks out of the box. Overall, it’s a very robust and well-rounded extension.

Despite the benefits associated with K2, we ultimately chose to use WordPress for the blog portion of our site. The decision came down to a few key points:

• Long-term outlook. K2’s development seemed to stall during the summer months and it was uncertain whether the component would be available for Joomla 1.7. Though it was eventually released, the lack of information coming from the developers brought the long-term viability of the product into question. We didn’t feel comfortable being dependent on a component that may not be in development indefinitely. WordPress, on the other hand, is here to stay.
• Performance. We’re already putting a lot of effort into maximizing the performance of our core Joomla website, and installing another component would only bog us down. K2 also has trouble with some of the compression tools we use, which means we couldn’t use them together to speed things up.
• Flexibility and ease of use. WordPress was built for blogging and is much easier to use. As we grow, more people within the company will be responsible for publishing, and it’s important that we have something that’s straight forward and easy to navigate. Joomla has a steeper learning curve, even steeper when using K2, and it would be tougher for the average user to blog with on a regular basis. Plus, Joomla is powering our core website and is more critical to our operation, so the less people we have using it, the better.

Ultimately, WordPress was the best choice and we’re happy with our decision. The hardest part of the setup was developing a theme that matched the rest of our site, but that was accomplished in a day or so and it turned out rather well. We currently have WordPress running in a sub-directory and there haven’t been any problems.

What do you think of our decision? Were there other factors we should have considered? Potential problems we should be aware of? We would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

What are some of your favorite books?

People that read share certain characteristics that I look for in potential employees.  They have the ability to focus on a singular task, have a great attention span, and are interested in self-improvement through learning.  Reading is also a more laborious task than watching TV or playing a video game.  I will discuss with them what they are reading as well; what they read reflects who they are as a person and their likes/dislikes.  You don’t have to necessarily like what they read but through discussion you can understand what they like and who they are by their choices.  I generally will not hire a person if they don’t read as a hobby.

True Story:  If you have an applicant that says their favorite book is  “Dealing with Anger”.  You can draw the conclusion that they are interested in self-help, which is a positive, but they also may have anger issues.  You can ask them additional questions to determine if your conclusions are correct,such as “Why do you like this book?”  They could respond, ”In the past I have found myself becoming extremely angry at customers. I often have to vent to my co-workers about how stupid people are.”  This is the same person that answered “no” to “Have you ever lost your patience with a customer?” They may not have had a direct outburst with a customer, but now you know they may take their frustration out on their co-workers and hurt the overall morale of your operations.  This is an extreme example, but you will find out a lot about an applicant through this question.

What type of hobbies do you have?

People with hobbies are people that are committed and are often passionate.  I think we can all agree that commitment and passion are attractive qualities in an applicant.  Their actual hobby is notimportant; what is important is that they have found something that they love doing and they stick with it.  If they don’t have hobbies or have had continually changing hobbies they more than likely lack the commitment and passion to invest themselves.  Ask them about their hobby; “Why did you decide to start crocheting?  What do you like about crocheting?  How long have you been crocheting?  What is the neatest thing you have crocheted?  Can you make me a sweater?”  These conversations often turn out to be very interesting and you can learn a lot about your potentialemployee and their interests.

What’s your favorite movie?

There are a lot of good movies out there and this is a really subjective question.  I go into this question understanding that people are very diverse and there are many favorite movies out there.  I have received all types of answers and there are really no wrong answers outside of “Battlefield Earth” or “Scary Movie 4″.  If they don’t have a favorite movie there are generally two reasons, one very negative and one very positive. The very negative is that the applicant watches so many movies and so much TV that they can’t pick a favorite.  I enjoy watching TV and movies but I consider the hobby of watching TV and movies to be that of an unmotivated person. The positive answer, which I don’t hear too often is that the person doesn’t have a TV or watches very little TV.  This is generally a person with diverse interests who spend a good portion of their time trying to better themselves.

There are many non-work related questions you can ask an applicant to understand them and their motivations better.  I generally spend 10-20 minutes during the interview on these type of questions and they weigh heavily on my decisions to hire a person.  I encourage you to ask these or similar questions during your interviews.  You will learn more than you ever expected about a person.

Managed properly, outsourcing a portion of your calls to a professional call center can be an extremely effective and worthwhile business decision. Your practice can provide patients with a better level of care, filter messages for on-call personnel, and avoid the high costs associated with hiring dedicated staff or implementing complicated automated systems. Done improperly, relationships with patients can be harmed and hard earned dollars wasted.

This brief guide will help you make sure you do everything you can on your end to make the outsourcing relationship a success.

1. Make sure your account instructions fit your practice

It’s important that you spend some extra time making sure your call taking script and account instructions are appropriate for the type of calls being handled on your account. Before an answering service can start taking calls for you, they have to be aware of what type of calls to expect on your account and how they should be handled. This process includes developing your script and instructions for delivering your messages.

If your service provider is experienced and has worked with a lot of medical practices in the past, chances are they have a standard script and account instructions that they will present to you. Although these default scripts are a great starting point, they most likely aren’t a perfect fit right out of the box. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to use a default script without scrutinizing it and making sure it works for your patients.

For example, some medical practices do not handle prescription calls after hours and do not want their on-call personnel paged for anything regarding a prescription. Another practice, however, such as one that performs a lot of surgeries, may routinely take such calls and may have patients with urgent prescription needs after hours. As you can imagine, having an account that does not allow the proper calls to reach on-call personnel is a major problem, one that can not only harm your reputation but also result in lawsuits and financial losses.

So, take some extra time and explore the script from every angle, ensuring the questions and corresponding instructions match up with your procedures.

2. Inform the right people of your call center procedures

It’s important that everyone involved — including on-call doctors, patients, and office staff — be informed of your call center’s procedures and how they are personally affected by them. Doctors should be aware of how the call center will be contacting them after hours and how to make changes to that procedure; patients should be aware of what is an acceptable after hours emergency and how to reach the call center; office staff should be aware of how non-urgent messages will reach them in the morning and whether or not they are listed as a back-up for account clarifications.

All too often, various people are unaware of how they fit into the process and end up getting angry or frustrated when they are called upon. For example, maybe an office assistant is listed as the person your call center should reach if there is no on-call doctor listed. If that assistant isn’t aware he or she may be called after hours, they may not be prepared to assist the call center when asked and may feel that the agents aren’t performing their jobs properly. In reality, however, a lack of communication caused the mix up and could have been easily avoided.

3. Treat your call center as part of your practice and update them regularly

Just as it’s important to keep parties on your end informed, it’s also important to regularly update your call center. By considering them a part of your business, you’ll be more likely to include them when instituting changes that may affect how they operate.

So if your schedule changes, you add or lose doctors, your on-call procedures change, or you build a website for downloading new patient forms, it’s important your call center is made aware. If your office staff has this information but fails to provide it to the call center, callers who reach them looking for it will be upset and won’t find the service beneficial.

4. Look for new ways to integrate your call center into your practice

When you first start working with your call center, it’s likely that they only provide you with a basic service, such as after-hours answering. However, due to advances in technology, there are most likely more services they could be providing, such as appointment scheduling. As you move forward, it’s a good idea to speak with your sales or customer service representative in order to understand all of their capabilities and to ask about specific needs you may have. It’s possible that they could do a lot more for your callers and thus become a more valuable part of your operation. So instead of asking someone who calls after hours asking about their appointment time to call back when the office opens, or taking a message so someone can return their call, maybe it’s possible for your call center to integrate with your software system and look up their appointment information.

5. Use your call center data to make improvements

All of the calls handled by your call center should be logged and recorded, and there are a variety of ways this data can be used to improve your operation and ensure that your call center is effective. By staying on top of this data and being aware of what occurs on your line, you can be certain that your patients are receiving accurate information, that your account is configured properly, and that you’re getting the most out of your service.

As an example, you may notice that a certain amount of minutes are being used but that you aren’t getting any messages. After listening to some calls, you may determine this is due to only accepting emergencies after hours and asking other callers to call back. Armed with the knowledge that a lot of patients are calling after hours for things they can’t be assisted with, you may decide to make some changes that either reduce these calls or improve what can be done for them. So maybe you have your call center record an automated pre-screen asking non-urgent callers to call back during office hours and send out an email to patients about what your call center is capable of, if you want to reduce the calls, or perhaps you take a closer look at the reasons people are calling and work with your call center to allow agents to take more messages and perform more tasks, thus eliminating the need for people to call back the next day. Either way, you’ve taken advantage of the information your call center data reveals and taken action to improve, something that your patients will certainly appreciate.

By following these steps and working closely with a professional and reputable call center, you can be certain that you’re providing the highest level of care to your patients. As a reminder, these tips are for medical practitioners and the personnel they have managing their call center service, not the call center themselves. There are obviously a lot of responsibilities on the call center’s end that play a part in the success of the relationship. I plan to explore these in another post.

If you have any feedback on managing a relationship with a call center or other tips that could be added to this list, feel free to email me – gere.jordan@continentalmessage.com. I would love to speak with you about it.

The best way to truly get to know the applicant is to get them to talk about their personal interests. You want the employee to let their guard down and show you the real them. If you do end up having one of those “Why are you telling me this?” moments, then they are probably not a good fit for your organization because they don’t understand what’s appropriate to speak about with a potential employer. On the other hand, you may find that you really like this person, and that they are passionate, have strong interests, and you can envision them fitting in well in your environment.

This moment is extremely important because your goal is to truly understand the applicant’s motivations and potential, and you want to determine if they would be a good fit for your company’s culture. You need new employees that share your current staff’s values and practices. The better the applicant fits into your corporate culture, the smoother their transition will be into the position and the more harmonious and successful your organization will become.

One item to keep in mind is that you don’t have to share similar likes with the applicant. I myself am not an avid crocheter, but if I have an applicant that is passionate about crocheting, I can respect and appreciate that. What’s important is that you see passion and depth in their personal interests. If a person doesn’t have strong passions/interests in their personal life, they more than likely will not be passionate or have strong interest about your company or their job.

There are a few personal questions you want to stay away from during an interview for legal purposes. You may decide to occasionally ask these questions outside the workplace, but I think you will find that they pretty much aren’t good to ask in general….so tread very carefully when asking these in a personal setting….and never ask them at work!

Question: How old are you?

Personal Setting: If you feel that you have to ask, walk away.

Work Place: Never ask. Age Discrimination

Question: Are you married?

Personal Setting: Could be important depending on where you meet the person.

Work Place: Never ask. Gender Based Discrimination

Question: How much do you weigh?

Personal Setting: Don’t go there, unless the elevator is really full and you’re on a high floor.

Work Place: Never ask. Do you really need a reason?

Question: Are you pregnant?

Personal Setting: If they aren’t, they are really going to be ticked. You can’t excuse your way out of this one. Trust me on this one.

Work Place: Never ask. Gender Based Discrimination

Question: What is your nationality?

Personal Setting: Only important at a beauty pageant or the spelling bee.

Work Place: Never ask. Origin/Racial Discrimination

Question: What religion do you practice?

Personal Setting: Go there if you want, but plan on staying a while.

Work Place: Never ask. Religious Discrimination

Now, on to the questions you can ask.

• What is your favorite book?
• What type of hobbies do you have?
• What’s your favorite movie?
• Do you have siblings? What professions are they in?
• What is your dream job?
• Do you travel? What is the favorite place you have been?

In my next blog I’ll provide you some insight into why I ask these questions and what types of responses I look for in a new hire.

• What are you major strengths?
• Where would you like to see yourself improve?
• Tell me about a time ….

Applicants have had multiple rehearsals on how to answer these questions. If they are serious about the position, they have more than likely planned and rehearsed their answers, multiple times. Is your organization looking to cast the lead role in their latest production; or are you looking for a serious applicant that can be a great employee and grow with your company?

So what do these questions tell you? They may let you know that the applicant is willing to do research, or that they have practiced beforehand or that they know how to “talk the talk.” However, do they give you a true indication of who the applicant is? I would say no they do not, but they do give you two insights.

First, they tell you what this person believes the right answers to be in order to get the job. They may be truthful in some capacities, but they are nevertheless rehearsed responses. If they have very unique answers you also know that they have put much thought into these questions.

Second, they tell you if this person prepared for the interview or has the polish to answer these questions properly. If they aren’t prepared to answer standard interview questions, and they stumble over their answers they probably aren’t a good fit for your organization.

I wouldn’t discourage using standard interview questions, but I would encourage interviewers to ask two additional questions related to standard out-of-the-box questions. Go a level deeper on these questions to truly get to know the applicant.

Question: What are you major strengths?

Follow-up Questions: How would you apply these strengths at our company?

How did you become so strong in these areas?

How far do you think these strengths can take you at our company?

Question: Where would you like to see yourself improve?

Follow-up Questions: How do you think our company will help you improve?

What are doing to improve in this area?

What is a second area you would like to improve in?

Through expanding these standard interview questions you will be able to better judge whether the applicant is a good fit for your organization. In most interviews I will ask 3-5 of these interview questions with follow-up questions. The rest of the interview I spend asking more personal/out of the box questions in an attempt to truly understand the applicant’s motivations and potential. In my next blog I will address this line of questioning and the benefits.

Are you ready to commit to a 15-30 minute phone interview? Or would you like to rule out even more applicants, and save yourself countless hours of time on the phone?

If you are ready for phone interviews stop HERE.

If you want to find out more about the applicant’s motivation, ability to follow instructions, and their analytical thought process – all in just a few minutes of your time – then continue reading.

Copy, Paste, Send

Use a template e-mail questionnaire to identify the applicants that can follow instructions, have the right motivations, and show a desire to work for your organization. Although your time commitment throughout the application process has been minimal, qualified applicants have spent a significant amount of time on their application – and you will be able to tell.

The template I use (See Below) has 3 standard questions, and I will add up to 2 additional questions based on the information on their applications. The questions are insightful and not position specific so you’ll be able to use the template for any position you are hiring for.

E-mail Questionnaire

Analyzing the Questionnaire

Can they follow Instructions?

Let’s start with some basics. Can they follow instructions? It is completely acceptable to not read instructions when putting together a piece of furniture (Yes I still have to put my furniture together. Where do you shop?), swing set, or to not read a map, but in a professional capacity it is not acceptable to not read instructions.

In the email you can see that I have asked applicants to forward their response to an email address that is different than where I send the questionnaire from. They are specifically asked to not reply directly to the email. So if they do, you can assume that they can not follow simple instructions or read directions thoroughly. Also, I judge how quickly they respond. If they take more than 5 days to respond I rule them out.

What’s their motivation?

I feel that I can accurately gauge a person’s intelligence. For example, I am the smartest person that I know. Seriously though, you can gauge intelligence by the thoroughness of the responses, the relevancy of responses, and the overall effort throughout the application process. What I have a hard time judging is an applicant’s motivations. They may have many years at one organization which does show overall motivation, but what other underlying factors kept them there so long? This question is designed specifically to help me gauge what the applicant is looking for from a company, and whether or not what they are looking for is representative of our organization.

Asking the applicant about their motivation will give you a ton of insight into why he or she is applying. Their answers also provide an excellent talking point during the interview

If they are 100% interested in compensation I know that the job is only about a paycheck and this is a person that is more than likely going to jump at a higher paying opportunity regardless of their opportunities for advancement and/or environment. If they answer above 50% on work environment then they have more than likely had a bad work experience and this number will give you the opportunity to discuss that with them. If they answer high on opportunities for advancement, I know that this person is interested in getting ahead.

This is another question that provides insight into motivation. We are in the courting position, and I want ,to know why they are interested. Are we the last single sitting at the bar at the end of the night or are we the one that attracts all the attention at 7pm while everyone is still sober?

I expect to see a couple sentence answer to this question. We are starting a relationship. I want to be wooed. I want to know why we are a good match. I want an even response about what is good about us and what is good about them. If they respond with a couple words, a single sentence, or desperation, I rule them out. I like to see answers that reference previous work experience, that they were referred to our organization, or that they are interested in opportunities for advancement. Another great talking point for an interview.

Why are they a good fit?

I believe customer service is universal. No matter what industry you work in you are expected to provide good customer service. Unless of course you are a cell phone company, cable company, satellite tv company, a bank, or an internet powerhouse (you know who you are Google, Apple, and Amazon). Let me rephrase and say that if you are small business or a frontline employee at a large business dealing with consumers, you are expected to provide high quality customer service. Therefore no matter where they have worked, they should be able to relate their skills and previous work experience to our organization.

We are an outsourcing call center and I like to see how someone with a retail background or food service will relate their experience to their possible job role. I expect a two sentences or more answer to this question. I rule out any applicant that has one word or one sentences answers.

Once you have received the e-mail response from the applicant, then review their answers and determine if they are a good fit for a phone interview. I will address the rest of the application/interview process in future blogs. Please feel free to e-mail me with questions, suggestions, etc.