When should you consider a candidate’s customer service skills when hiring?

If I'm running the help desk, even in the interview process, customer service skills are the first thing I look for. I don't really care about their help desk skills, that's secondary to customer service. Show me your experience with helping customers—I want examples of how you made them better than what they were before.

And if the candidate doesn't have a good personality, or they're not going to be nice to people—which you can tell pretty quickly when you're talking to them—I don't hire them. So the value of customer service is ingrained even before they get hired.

You can help sharpen their customer service skills, but you can't innately make them customer-obsessed. If they're customer-obsessed then you can build upon that, but if they don't have it in their DNA, there are plenty of other roles that they can fulfill but not necessarily this one.

Identifying customer service skills is 100% important from a customer experience standpoint. It's about the culture. It takes one bad apple to ruin 20 people and make everybody's life miserable. You can teach people technology, but you can't teach attitude or empathy. If someone has a bad attitude, it's really hard to course correct that.