15 Customer Service Interview Questions Every Optometry Hiring Manager Should Ask

When it comes to hiring in optometry, finding the right people for your team is critical to your success. Your employees are the heart and soul of your practice, and how they treat your patients will determine whether your organization thrives or fails. Having the best optometry customer service in town will boost your business; having the worst will send customers elsewhere.

Whether you’re interviewing a seasoned pro with an extensive background in the optometry field or someone brand new to the industry, gauging their customer service skills by asking the right customer service interview questions is essential. If you want patients to come back and recommend their friends and family members, they must have a positive experience in your practice. Case in point, New York-based Moscot Eyewear and Eyecare credits their team’s top-notch customer service for their 80% customer return rate.

Quizzing a candidate on their eye care knowledge is one thing – knowing how to accurately measure empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence when hiring in optometry is a whole other story. And these soft skills are often the hardest to teach.

Here are 15 optometry customer service interview questions to consider asking potential hires:

1. What does good customer service mean to you?

2. In addition to optometry knowledge, education, and technical qualifications, what other skills do you think are essential for this position?

3. Tell me about a time when you effectively responded to an upset patient or customer.

4. In your opinion, what types of patients are the most difficult to work with?

5. What’s your favorite thing about working in the optometry field? Or, why do you want to work in optometry?

6. A patient comes in to pick up their prescription and it isn’t ready. What do you do?

7. What are the three most important traits a person must have to succeed in optometry?

8. What have you done in the past year to improve your customer service skills?

9. What do you do if you don’t know the answer to a patient’s question?

10. What do you do if a patient points out an error you made?

11. If you could share just one piece of customer service advice, what would it be?

12. What’s the best customer service you’ve ever received? What’s the worst customer service you’ve ever received?

13. Tell me about a time a patient was wrong or mistaken and how you handled it.

14. Your practice is running more than an hour behind on their appointment schedule. How do you communicate this to your patients?

15. In your opinion, how important is customer service to an optometry practice’s bottom line?

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When hiring in optometry, use the customer service interview questions above (which include solid behavioral interview questions) to get a nice mix of answers that are real-world examples, theoretical responses, and personal opinions. By clearly assessing a candidate’s customer service skills and accurately identifying those with the utmost dedication to patient satisfaction, you can be confident you’re hiring the right people for your team.