Hiring guides
What good looks like: a benchmark for first-line Customer Support
Eight measurable signals, drawn from hundreds of hires, that separate first-rate support reps from competent ones.
The Adarna Team
Editors
"Good" in Customer Support is one of those things everyone recognises but nobody writes down. The result is a hiring process that lurches between gut feel and a scoring rubric copied from a recruiter on LinkedIn. This piece is the version of the rubric we actually use, the one every Philippines-based Customer Support candidate is scored against inside the Adarna assessment, built from two decades of BPO quality-assurance practice and rebuilt for startup support work.
The eight signals
- Acknowledges the customer's emotion before solving, in one short sentence, not a paragraph.
- States what will happen next, with a clear timeline, even when the timeline is 'I will get back to you within four hours'.
- Knows when not to answer: escalates account-security questions, refund-policy edge cases, anything that touches another customer's data.
- Writes in a tone that matches the customer's. A formal billing question gets a formal reply. A casual feature question does not get a corporate template.
- Cites internal context when relevant ('I can see from your account that your last payment was last Tuesday'), but never reveals data the customer did not already know.
- Closes the loop. Documents the conversation in the ticket. Tags the right team. Updates the customer when the underlying issue is fixed.
- Flags the second occurrence. Knows that the same bug reported by two customers is no longer a one-off.
- Asks the boring question. 'What were you trying to do?' surfaces more product insight than every 'how can we help you better?' survey combined.
Most of these are visible in a candidate's response to a single well-chosen customer scenario. You do not need fifteen rounds to assess them. You need one good prompt.
What the bad version looks like
It is also worth being concrete about what mediocre Customer Support looks like in writing. The tells: replies that lead with policy ("Per our terms..."), responses that solve a problem the customer did not ask about, an over-use of "I understand" without showing they actually do, and the giveaway phrase "I am sorry for the inconvenience" with no follow-up plan.
How to score it
We score on a 0–100 scale across four axes (empathy & tone, problem ownership, accuracy & factual care, and written English), each weighted equally. Anyone below 60 on any axis does not pass. Anyone above 80 across all four is rare, and we flag those candidates for fast-track placement.
The score itself matters less than what it is grading against. Build the rubric before you build the role description, and write your hiring bar in numbers. Then keep the bar.