Customer service selection criteria examples

As a client service officer at the Tarran Valley housing office, I give customer-focused service by owning a problem until it is fixed, even when the answer sits with another team.

In August 2025 a tenant came to the counter in tears. Her rent had jumped from $186 to $412 a week because her income review still included her late husband’s pension, and she had received an arrears notice. She had already rung twice.

I took her to a private room and let her tell the whole story. Checking her file with her, I found the death certificate had been received but never linked to the review. Rather than send another referral, I phoned the review team leader, explained what I’d found and asked for the review to be redone that day, and my supervisor put the arrears notice on hold. I gave the tenant my direct number, told her what would happen and when, and rang her that afternoon and again when the new letter went out.

Her rent was corrected to $191 within 24 hours and the $678 in arrears was reversed. I raised the case at our team meeting, and the review checklist now includes a check for linked documents.

As a student services officer at Marrick University, I improve service by looking at why students contact us, not just how fast we answer.

Our team of six received around 2,300 enquiries a semester about special consideration, and in peak weeks email replies took up to nine working days. My manager asked me to reduce the load before Semester 1, 2026.

I tagged a sample of 400 enquiries by topic and found that 61 per cent asked one of three things: what evidence counts, whether a request had arrived, and when students would hear back. I drafted a plain-English evidence checklist, had the faculty assessment officers check it against policy, and tested it with eight students at the desk. I worked with the systems team to add an automatic receipt email with a reference number and an expected outcome date. I also wrote reply templates for the next ten most common questions and trained the team in two 30-minute sessions.

In Semester 1, 2026 enquiries fell to about 1,350, peak-week replies dropped to three working days, and satisfaction in our end-of-semester survey rose from 58 to 79 per cent.

I have worked on the customer service counter at Bellingarra Regional Council for three years, where four of us usually serve about 90 residents a day.

The morning after a severe storm in November 2025, more than 60 people were waiting when we opened, and two colleagues were stuck behind closed roads. One man began shouting that council had ignored his calls about a tree on his roof.

I asked my colleague to take the phones and walked the queue, sorting people into vouchers only, reports, and urgent safety issues. Issuing green waste vouchers on the spot cleared about half the queue in 40 minutes. I spoke with the man privately, acknowledged that waiting with a damaged roof was frightening, and checked the system with him. His request had been logged but not escalated, so I rang our works coordinator in front of him, booked an arborist for that afternoon and wrote the time on his receipt. Every half hour I updated the queue on wait times.

We served 142 residents that day without a formal complaint, and the man later emailed the general manager to thank the team. My manager asked me to turn the triage into a storm procedure, which we used again in March.

As APS 6 team leader of a 12-person processing team for the Regional Assistance Grants program, I am responsible for the service applicants receive from enquiry to payment.

When I took over in early 2025, complaints had doubled in a year to about 30 a month, and most said applicants didn’t know where their claim was up to. Processing times met the service standard, so the problem was silence, not speed.

I read three months of complaints and mapped when applicants called: most rang around day 15, having heard nothing since lodging. I proposed to my director a status email at lodgement and at day 14, and a commitment that assessors would phone applicants when more information was needed rather than send a form letter. I won the team’s support for the calls by walking them through the complaint data, and built a short call guide. I also added a one-question survey to every decision letter, and each fortnight the team reviews the results and picks one thing to fix.

Within six months complaints fell to about eight a month and status calls dropped by 40 per cent, freeing about 15 assessor hours a week. Satisfaction rose from 3.1 to 4.2 out of 5, and two other teams have adopted the status emails.