5 Traits to Look for in a Retail Employee

Here are the qualities to look for when hiring an employee who will provide stellar service at your store or small business.

Hiring is a key when you want to provide the best service in your small business or store. It’s important to seek employees who will go above and beyond for the customer.

The problem is, it can be tough to tell during the interview process who will strive to serve your customers with excellence and who will simply bide their time until the end of their shift. You can increase your odds of making a good hire by looking for traits that contribute to the ability to provide great customer service. “Great retail employees possess traits and skills that other retail employees just don’t,” Francesca Nicasio states on VendHQ.

Here are five personal qualities to seek when you’re hiring a customer-facing employee in your retail business:

Empathy

This is a trait that should be at the top of every store manager or owner’s wish list. The ability to empathize allows a retail employee to put themselves in a customer’s position and to imagine how they feel. Empathy is important for everything from making small talk during a transaction to helping a customer who’s aggravated, irked or annoyed by a service issue. Hiring site Glassdoor recommends asking job interview questions specifically geared to assessing the ability to empathize. One example: “An unhappy customer demands a full refund against our company’s policy. What do you do?”

Friendliness

Your customers will be able to tell if an employee genuinely enjoys interacting with them or is just counting the minutes until their next break. “While you don’t need to be an extrovert to be a great retail employee (I knew one or two introverts who crushed the game)” Nicasio states, “you do have to be friendly.” So how can you tell if an employee is friendly? The recruiting platform HireRabbit suggests four ways: ask their references, observe their behavior outside the formal  interview, use a personality test or do a trial run for the job.

Initiative

The ability to take initiative is one of the most important personal traits that can help an employee provide good service. While it’s easy to train employees on general tasks—how to ring up a sale, or how to process a return, for example, they will inevitably be faced with situations that weren’t in the training manual. Business expert Joel Trammell writes about questions you can ask in a job interview to see if a candidate has what he calls “creative initiative.” In a retail situation, that means the employee will figure out what to do in a given situation, even if they haven’t been told.

Problem solving skills

A retail employee with both initiative and problem-solving skills will be able to provide truly stellar service. For customers, one of the most frustrating service situations is dealing with an employee who doesn’t know how to solve a problem and doesn’t care to find out. They might say, “That’s not my department” or “I don’t know how to do that in our system.” That often leaves a customer asking for a manager, or walking away feeling frustrated. In contrast, a problem solver will welcome a glitch as a learning opportunity. They may not know how to do something, but they will figure it out, come up with an idea on their own or ask another employee for help getting the issue solved.

Ability to focus on the moment

If you’ve ever tried meditation, you may be familiar with the term “monkey mind.” It’s when your brain is focused on everything except the present moment. But providing great customer service requires the ability to focus on the person and the situation right in front of you. A customer will be able to sense if an employee is just going through the motions while their mind is on what they’re having for dinner or their main squeeze’s latest text. That’s why the ability to focus on, and even enjoy what you’re doing in the moment, is a key trait in a retail employee.

Hiring the right retail employees is important if you want to provide fantastic service. They are the “face” of your store or small business, so choosing wisely can really pay off by creating scores of happy customers.