A consistent way to assess customer service applicants
Give the people who hire a consistent way to assess applicants for the role.
Your business hires customer-facing staff all year, and each hiring manager may do it their own way. For most, that means a pile of applications, a few CVs read quickly, and an interview. A CV mostly shows how well someone presents themselves on paper. It says very little about how they will deal with a customer who is already annoyed by the time they reach the counter.
Using the same screen for comparable roles gives you a consistent hiring standard across the business. The people you hire are the people you then have to keep, and to every customer they serve, they are the face of your brand.
What the applicant does, and what you get
Ten to fifteen minutes online, and a report within minutes.
It measures eight characteristics that matter in customer service work: staying calm under pressure, enjoying being with people, working steadily towards goals, planning and organisation, consideration for others, a preference for routine and consistency, humility in service, and being comfortable as part of a team rather than needing to lead it.
In jobs where the customer interaction is the product, much of what predicts performance is temperament: staying even-tempered with a difficult customer, liking people, being content to do a routine the same way every time. That is exactly what an interview is worst at detecting, because everyone is on their best behaviour for half an hour. A questionnaire built so the flattering answer isn't obvious gets closer to how someone will behave on an ordinary Tuesday.
Tested on 10,000 people doing the job
It was validated against real customer service performance, in the kinds of business you run.
The questionnaire was validated against objective measures of customer service performance for around 10,000 people working in retail, hospitality and financial services. That is a large sample by the standards of workplace testing, and it was drawn from exactly the kinds of front-line roles you fill.
The design matters as much as the sample. Most self-report questionnaires can be gamed by an applicant who works out what the employer wants to hear. This one makes applicants trade off between statements that are equally appealing, so the socially acceptable answer is hard to identify. What comes back is closer to how the person actually is than to how they would like to appear.
The result is fewer bad hires and lower training costs — and, because the people serving your customers are better at it, stronger sales, more new customers and more who come back.
Applicants find it hard to tell which answer flatters them. That is the point of the design.
What happens once the results arrive
The hiring manager makes the decision. Our psychologists make sure the screen is asking the right questions before they do.
Before the first applicant sees it, one of our psychologists works through your roles with you: which roles it should be used for, what good customer service looks like in your business, and where the bar should sit. You have that conversation once, at the start, and it is what makes every result afterwards mean something.
From then on, reports go to the person doing the hiring. They are written to be read by a manager with no training in psychology, and we support managers in reading them. The report isn't a verdict. Most of its value is in the interview it sets up: an applicant who scored well on enjoying people but low on staying calm under pressure is someone to ask about the worst customer they have dealt with.
The same questionnaire works on the staff you already have. Run across a team, it shows where customer service development would make the most difference — and, if you want it, where across the business the same gaps keep appearing.
The evidence behind it
Published reliability, a large validation sample, and a university partner in its development.
The Customer Service Predictor was developed with Central Queensland University. Its reliability is published. Someone who takes it twice gets much the same result (a test-retest correlation of .78), and the eight characteristics hold together as a coherent measure (internal consistency of .85). Both are strong results for a workplace test. They mean a manager can trust a result to reflect the person, not the day they happened to take it.
Results are compared against Australian norms drawn from people working in retail, hospitality and financial services.
Psych Press has developed and published psychometric instruments since 1995, in-house and in partnership with universities and international test publishers.
Who it suits, and who it doesn't
Businesses where the way a customer is treated is part of what the brand sells.
It suits
Businesses whose front-line staff deal with customers all day — retail, hospitality, service businesses — whether hiring is managed centrally or by individual teams. It also suits businesses that want to develop the customer service staff they already have, not only hire better ones. For roles where reading a customer's mood matters most, our Emotional Reasoning Questionnaire, an ability test of how well someone reads what others are feeling, can sit alongside it.
It isn't built for
Management and other roles outside front-line customer service, which need more than this screen — our selection reports and assessment centres cover those. Nor roles where selling, rather than serving, is the job; sales screening covers those.
Retail, hospitality and sales roles each have their own screen, built for the role: retail screening, hospitality screening and sales screening. For security-services businesses, the Security Employment Screening Questionnaire combines work history, reasoning, situational judgement and personality.
Frequently asked questions
Won't this slow hiring down when a shift needs filling?
No. The applicant spends 10–15 minutes on it, scoring is automatic, and the report is ready within minutes, so the hiring manager has it before they would have got round to arranging the interview.
Can applicants fake their answers?
Its design makes that difficult. Instead of asking people to rate themselves, where anyone can present well, it makes them choose between statements that are equally appealing, so the socially acceptable answer is hard to spot. As with any screen, the result then guides the interview rather than deciding it.
Can we use it on staff who already work for us?
Yes. Run on an existing team, it shows which customer service characteristics are strong and which need development — which gives the employee and their manager something specific to work on.
What does it cost?
It depends on how many sites use it, how many people go through it, and whether you are screening applicants, assessing current staff, or both, so we scope it with you. The figure worth setting it against is what one bad customer-facing hire costs before it is put right.
Start a conversation with us
Tell us about your situation and the support you are looking for. You can write as much as you need.
Or call us on +61 3 9670 0590.