| Accomplishment Acknowledgments |
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| Written by Abby Kohut |
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Let's first review the responsibilities of a typical Customer Service Rep at a call center for a company like 1-800-Flowers:
How many of the 1000 resumes that I receive list those five bullets under the title of Customer Service Rep? Usually it's 990. So what do the other 10% do? They are the ones who tell me WHY they are the best Customer Service Rep I could possibly hire. Then they prove their point with a compressive list of accomplishments. What I want to know about you is not that you know how to answer phones and help customers. I knew that before I even received your resume because that's what a customer service rep does. How many people don't know how to do these things? What I don't know is how you excel at doing these things. I want to know if you help more customers in less time than your peers. I want to know if you turn 100% of your irate customers into happy customers. I want to know if any of your customers called your boss to tell them how wonderful you were. I want to know if you are known for entering orders without mistakes. Those are the things I will ask you during your interview but the way to get the interview in the first place is to make sure that I know about them before I meet you. Now, before you go ahead and just add these things to your resume, take some time to think about how you can prove each of these accomplishments to your next interviewer. Listing specific accomplishments is a good start. Take it further by arming yourself with a binder full of letters of recommendation from former managers, print-outs of e-mails from satisfied customers, and solid samples of your work (the public work you can share not the proprietary materials you can't.) Absolutely Abby’s Advice: These days the competition is fierce. Think of all the things that make you different and special and write those on your resume. Think of any honors or awards that you've won, even if they are from a while ago as intelligence. Good performance tends to be consistent over time. Tell me on your resume why I should hire YOU, not just what you do every day at your job. Acknowledge your accomplishments and you'll get Absolute applause. |
Do you know how many resumes I receive when I place an ad for a Customer Service Representative? Pick a number and then double it. Disney and The Gap probably receive 1000. So how exactly am I going to decide which one of the 1000 to hire? I need your help.