Get It Right at the Source: Hiring for Customer Service Success

A friend who teaches home music recording has a mantra: “Get It Right at the Source” (GIRATS). In music production, nailing the details early—microphone placement, gain, input quality—makes the entire process exponentially easier. The same principle applies to building a top-shelf customer service team. The source? Hiring.

Get hiring wrong, and you can still succeed, but it’s an uphill battle. I once inherited a disengaged, underperforming customer service team shell-shocked by poor leadership. We turned it around, but it took immense effort and patience. Get hiring right, and your team is primed for success from day one.

So, how do you GIRATS for customer service roles? Focus on two traits that matter most:

1. Curiosity
2. Willingness to Sound Dumb

Curiosity: The Spark of Greatness

Curious people are magnetic. They don’t just solve problems—they uncover opportunities. In customer service, curiosity drives agents to learn the product deeply, ask better questions, and find ways to improve processes. A curious team member might, while exploring the product, spot a tweak that streamlines engineering workflows or boosts marketing’s impact.

When hiring, look for genuine curiosity—not self-serving nosiness, but a desire to understand and improve the world around them. Curious agents don’t settle for “just do these steps.” They dig deeper, and that’s what makes them invaluable.

I’ve seen it firsthand: a curious support agent doesn’t just answer tickets—they uncover insights that make the whole team better. If someone’s content with just checking boxes, they won’t thrive on a high-performing team.

Willingness to Sound Dumb: The Path to Mastery

Ignorance isn’t a flaw—it’s a starting point. The courage to admit “I don’t know” is how people grow. When hiring, I’d pick someone who owns their gaps over a know-it-all every time. A team member who’s open about what they don’t understand quickly becomes the one who knows the most.

This vulnerability builds teams of superheroes. Everyone has strengths and areas to grow. Pretending otherwise stifles learning. A support agent who asks “dumb” questions about, say, how a server pulls database info, is the one who’ll master it—and then teach others.

Hire for Traits, Not Just Skills

You can teach a curious person technical skills. You can train someone who’s open about their gaps to navigate complex systems. But you can’t easily teach curiosity or vulnerability. When hiring for customer service, prioritize these traits over specific expertise. A resume full of tech skills is nice, but a curious, open candidate is gold.

Get it right at the source. Hire for curiosity and a willingness to sound dumb, and you’ll build a customer service team that doesn’t just succeed—it thrives.