Reader questions: Finding work in customer service

Second Sunday Series – Editor’s Note: This is the seventh of 12 columns focused on reader questions, appearing over 12 months – one on each second Sunday, from September through August. As a response to the confusing and upended job market, I’m devoting a year of “second Sundays” to job seeker questions. This month, I’m focusing on two readers who want to find work in customer service — see what you think.

1. The situation:

Like many Covid-era parents, this individual has not been employed for the past year while she has been homeschooling her kids. She has, however, taken classes to upgrade her skills and has decided to make a career change. Because it will take another year to become marketable in her new field, she’d like to supplement the household income with part-time customer service work. The problem? It’s been many years since she worked directly with customers and she doesn’t want to use a resume highlighting IT expertise from the field she’s leaving.

Advice: This job seeker has a good instinct related to her resume. It’s a classic mistake to assume an employer will be impressed with achievements in an unrelated field, or that they will imagine ‘If she can do that, she can easily do this job.’ If she wants customer service positions, her resume will need to show relevant skills and aptitudes.

Regardless of the candidate’s overall work history, this will be a one-page resume. Here are the five categories she might consider using:

Headline – to signal immediately that she’s seeking customer service roles.

Profile – a very brief paragraph that refers to customer service experience (“Background includes…”) as well as something about her work style (“Known for being efficient and tactful, even in stressful situations”).

Strengths – a brief bullet list, perhaps in two columns, naming six or 10 key abilities useful in customer service. For example, “Excellent phone skills” and “Basic Spanish fluency”

Customer Service Experience – it’s usually easiest to write the experience category last in this kind of resume, to keep from bogging down, so we’ll come back to this

Education – a shortened list with perhaps just the primary degree or course she’s taken, but not all the IT certificates or workplace trainings.

When she’s ready to complete the Customer Service Experience section, she might start with her most recent IT position, but use only a few lines to describe the customer service aspects of the job. For example:

Jackson Hospital IT Department, Jackson, IL, 20142020. Managerial role directing a team of five in assisting internal customers with IT issues. Coached team members in identifying the problem, calming the concerns of customers, and defining timelines for problem resolution. Spoke directly with frustrated or difficult customers to identify solutions.

The next entry could skip back decades, if necessary, to provide more relevant experience:

Hospitality and Retail positions, Springfield, IL, 20012005. Worked part-time in restaurants and department stores during school, providing friendly and efficient service. Roles included server, cashier, stockperson and retail sales.

The goal in this resume isn’t to provide a complete chronology, but to demonstrate capability in the position being requested.

2. The situation: Unlike the first candidate, this individual has already launched his job search in customer service, and has been getting interviews. Unfortunately, he’s not getting offers. What to do?

Advice: As always, this could be a simple matter of numbers. It can easily require interviews with five or ten different organizations before receiving an offer, regardless of the industry. This candidate may need to get a few more meetings under his belt before he’s mastered the process enough to shine.

That said, there are still things he can do to improve his odds. For example, he can polish his customer service message. This is a difficult job and employers look for people who demonstrate patience, flexible problem-solving, superior listening skills, the ability to work across cultures, and reliability, among other things. If this candidate can describe those qualities when answering interview questions, he’ll give employers a better picture of how he’d perform in the job.