Example answers

Take a look at these example answers to the Behaviours and Core Responsibility Areas. The Behaviours and Core Responsibility Areas for the position you are applying for can be found with the job advert.

Effective Communication

At ABC Distribution my role as Administration Officer involves responding to enquiries from members of the public on the telephone. I take initial calls from customers relating to sales orders and deliveries. To ensure I deal with calls quickly and effectively I ensure I am up-to-date with my product knowledge to enable me to deliver the best advice and recommendations when taking orders or confirming delivery times and details, I have also developed set routines and crib sheets to ensure I communicate information in a clear, concise and well structured manner which ensures I asked all relevant questions and obtain full details. As I am the first point of contact for many of our customers I ensure that I am always polite and friendly.

On occasions customers will phone with a complaint about the service they have received. When I speak to customers I ensure I listen carefully to their problem and again ask the right questions to clarify all points. One such example is a customer who had received his order but was displeased as he had been sent the wrong item. I immediately apologised of behalf on the company and took specific details of what had been delivered and order numbers, repeating these to ensure they were correct. The man on the phone was quite angry and I had to remain calm and polite. I ensured I took the correct details to rectify the situation.

Since that incident I have proposed that we send an email to customers confirming in writing the order. This allows our customers to check it and ensures the right products are dispatched.

Problem Solving

In my current role a problem arose whereby a customer was expecting delivery of an urgent parcel for forward shipment abroad. This parcel had not been received and the customer was anxious about the onward journey. I took relevant details from the customer; unfortunately he had taken down his reference number incorrectly so the order was not being recognised on the system.

I had to interrogate the ordering system by systematically running a variety of searches on delivery addresses and specific parts within the delivery. This enabled me confirm all deliveries to the address and to disregard those orders which had different parts to narrow down the list and obtain the correct order number.
Once this was established I then had to liaise with my colleague regarding the specific instructions made on the order, which were forwarded to the dispatch and delivery departments. I spoke to these departments to try and ascertain why the items had not been delivered. The dispatch team had overlooked the special delivery requests. This therefore meant that the delivery team were not advised.

I spoke to the logistics manager and explained the situation. After discussion with him he confirmed the delivery was en route, however, the driver had another two drop-offs first. I explained the difficultly our customer was in and we arranged for a second van to collect the parcel and ensure it was delivered on time. I updated the customer and the parcel was delivered in time for onward transportation. This was achieved through my systematic approach to tracking the order and persistence with logistics that we had to resolve this problem as it was out fault it was overlooked initially.

 Previous < > Next

 

	Printable Version