Customer service interview questions with a review guide
Six customer service screening questions with evidence to look for, a written exercise and a simple rating guide your hiring team can adapt.
Templates
An interview scorecard template your team can actually use
A row of ratings does not tell the next interviewer why someone should progress. The useful part of a scorecard is the evidence attached to each rating.
Build the card before reviewing applicants. That gives your team a common set of questions to answer and makes disagreements easier to discuss. The template below is a starting point for a structured interview, not a validated selection test.
Choose criteria from the work
Write down the tasks the person will do in their first months. Pick the skills your screening step can reasonably observe. For a support role, those might include investigating a problem and writing a clear reply. A recorded screen cannot establish every skill in a job description.
Give each criterion a question or exercise that can produce evidence for it. Remove criteria that rely on a vague overall impression, such as 'culture fit'. Describe the relevant behaviour instead.
Copy the review sheet
Copy and adapt
Role: Candidate: Reviewer: Question or exercise: Criterion: Evidence from the answer: Rating: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / insufficient evidence What the rating means for this question: Follow-up needed: Overall recommendation: progress / discuss / do not progress / more evidence needed Reason tied to the role criteria: Open question for the next interviewer:
Use a separate criterion entry for each skill you are assessing. Keep the original answer available so another reviewer can check the note. Avoid pasting an AI summary into the evidence field without comparing it with the response.
Describe the rating before assigning it
| Rating | Example anchor for a support reply |
|---|---|
| 1 | Misses the stated customer issue or makes a commitment outside the policy |
| 3 | Explains a reasonable next step within the policy in understandable language |
| 5 | Does the above and anticipates the information the customer will need next |
| Insufficient evidence | The answer is missing, unclear or does not let the reviewer assess this criterion |
Write anchors for the actual question. A short, accurate answer can be stronger than a long answer with several unsupported claims. If you weight criteria, agree on the weights before seeing candidates and record why those weights fit the role.
Try the card before the hiring round
Ask two reviewers to score the same sample answer independently. Compare their evidence notes before comparing the final numbers. If they disagree because the criterion means different things to them, rewrite it.
A sample can be a fictional answer written for this exercise. Label it as such. You do not need to put a real applicant through a scoring experiment to check whether your instructions are clear.
Keep the score in context
A total is a summary of the evidence you collected. It does not measure everything the candidate can do. Record a reason for the next step and carry unresolved questions into the live interview.
In Hirevly, reviewers can rate responses and add notes. Use a shared rubric alongside those reviews, check any optional AI observations against the original answer and give one person responsibility for the final decision.
Background: U.S. Office of Personnel Management on structured interviews
Putting this into practice?
See where Hirevly fits your hiring processFrom reading to your next role
Try your next screening round in Hirevly.
Create questions, invite candidates and review their answers with your team. The free plan includes five interviews.