Prepare for Customer Service Situational Judgement Test

Customer service jobs require you to have great interpersonal skills and the ability to choose the best response to any situation.

A situational judgement test (SJT) is just one customer service aptitude test used to help employers identify the candidates with the best skills for the job.

Prepare for your customer service situational judgement test with JobTestPrep’s dedicated resources.

The situational judgement test assesses whether you have the skills needed for a particular job. For customer service roles, your employers are looking at how good your customer service skills are and how well you deal with situations requiring you to:

There are usually no right or wrong answers, but your employer is looking for evidence that you can choose the most appropriate response to a workplace situation.

This style of situational judgement test is used for applicants for customer services, customer support, sales positions, and even trades people working for big employers (for example plumbers or electricians for B&Q).

The ability to secure customer satisfaction, manage situations with customers effectively and thinking on your feet is crucial to your success in any customer services job.

A test such as the customer service dilemmas test is a way for employers to see that you have these abilities.

In a customer services situational judgement test you are given a realistic work based scenario and asked questions to judge your response to the situation.

Each question will test you against one or more of the key competencies (skills) you need to do the job.

Once you have seen the question you are asked to do a variety of things with it. Some tests will ask you to choose the most appropriate response whilst others, such as the a&dc customer service dilemmas situational judgement test may ask you to rate the appropriateness of a list of responses.

Situational judgement tests are usually untimed, so you don’t have too much pressure when making decisions, but you should still work through them steadily.

The average time for a SJT is 20 to 40 minutes.

Preparation is key for any situational judgement test. By looking at practice tests ahead of taking the real test you can understand what you need to do in the test which in turn will help you stay calm.

Before taking any situational judgement test you should look at the required skills for the job you are applying to so that you know what your employers are looking for.

JobTestPrep have developed a tailored situational judgement test for customer service jobs, designed to give you an idea of the type of scenarios and questions you can expect in the real test.

Take a look at the free customer service SJT questions below. These question are taken from ©Pearson TalentLens's IRIS situational judgement test.

It is 9.30am on Monday morning.

Many telephone calls are now being received and a large number of them are still waiting to be answered. You and two of your colleagues are trying to answer as many calls as you can. However, your colleague Tami has been dealing with a member of the public at the front desk since 9.00am. You recognise the person she is dealing with, as you all know he complains a lot about matters that are not very important.

How appropriate is the following response to the situation?

Intervene in the conversation and make it clear to the member of the public that Let It Happen receive a lot of calls from the public and, to give a good service, time can only be given to those of a serious nature.

• Totally unacceptable
• Not helpful
• OK, but not ideal
• Good thing to do

(©Pearson Education 2008)

You take a call from a customer. He sounds angry.

“I have just spent the best part of an hour navigating through your website trying to find my local leisure centre to book a squash court and after all that it has just rejected my credit card and I have wasted my time. There is no problem with my card; I use it all the time on the internet with no problems. You need to get your website sorted.”

How appropriate is the following response to the situation?

Explain that thousands of transactions go through each day with no problems.

• Totally unacceptable
• Not helpful
• OK, but not ideal
• Good thing to do

(©Pearson Education 2008)