Page 85 - You're Hired! Interview Answers

taSk-BaSed QueStionS examPLe inteRview anSweRS interviewer: Quality is a key issue for us at the moment; can
you give me an example of a significant quality issue you
have had to deal with and tell me how you went
about it?

7 Poor answer:

“I’ve always felt that quality has to be at the heart of business culture, my

personal approach is to try and set an example, getting things right first time
and avoiding doing the same job twice. I don’t think anyone sets out to do a
bad job but sometimes management doesn’t set the right example. There was
a time when I was with ABC Ltd, when customer service levels had dropped off
to an unacceptable level. It was a staff turnover issue so I got our recruitment
people to change the agencies we were using so as to get a better level of
applicant. It didn’t happen overnight, but the better-quality staff has started
to drive the complaints levels down. I think quality is all about people taking
personal responsibility for their actions, it’s hard to control quality, you have to

build it in.”

This is a limited answer, too brief on the detail, preceded and followed by a
lot of waffle. No sign of CaR here. Depending on the seniority of the job, this
example might also be too local.

3 Better answer:

“To my mind, quality is often a matter of training people well and letting them

know what is needed from them. When I was General Manager at ABC Ltd our
customer research began to show that customer satisfaction had started to fall.
Now, there are lots of potential reasons for this and I wanted to know in more
detail what was going wrong. I brought in some customer service specialists
to look at the issue across all our call centres, because if it was affecting one
region, chances were it would be affecting the others. The research showed
that the main issue was staff turnover; because of the need to get frontline
call handlers working quickly we had cut back on the training time and this
was showing in terms of how effectively customers were being dealt with –
waiting times were too long. I asked the call centre managers to come up with
a solution – quickly! I told them that we needed to get the satisfaction figures

heading in the right direction in weeks, not months! ”

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