Interview nest week - need your wisdom

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Next Wednesday (9th July) I have an interview with the local council for a position as an IT Technician. The job itself is to provide IT support to local Primary Schools whose budget is too small to warrant a full time IT Tech within the school.

This is a position that I had an interview for last October/November, however I wasn't offered the job although they did make me their "holding candidate" which meant that if the other guy (or gal) didn't take the job or proved poor within 3 months, they would offer the job to me - I always classed it as being the runner up

They recently advertised the exact same job and I applied again and have an interview. One of the things that I remember struggling with in the original interview was a question that went something like this: -

"How would you ensure that you are providing good customer service to you customers?"

My question to the Forum is - how would you answer such a question or one that is similar? Any input greatly appreciated.

In addition, knowledge of the SIMS software is desirable and I do know what it is as I checked out their website at the time of the last interview. Anybody have any experience of this software and can offer me an insight to it?

Thanks all

Tim

Edit - well blow me, just got a call from another job I applied for and they have also invited me for an interview next week. Thats one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Lets hope that's an omen.

 

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Hi Tim
just out of interest is this job with Leicester county council ? just that they advertised a very similar job last week which i am applying for.

 

Hi Paul, no, this one is with the City Council. However, I think I know the one your talking about as my application for that is mostly done - is a temporary 12 month contract job as I recall.

 

personally i wouldnt bother with primary schools

i work in one at the moment as a full time ICT Technician / network admin and im finding it VERY hard to get another job because of the fact i work here

the way i see it, its a cushy and nice enviroment to work in in some respects but on the whole its **** pay, no career development oppertunities and holds you back if your looking to leave the education sector

if it were me i wouldnt be applying unless they were offering about 25k

each to their own though

 

The actual job is working for the local City Council to provide support to Primary Schools that don't have their own dedicated Tech, therefore I'm not actually going to be employed by a particular school. Hopefully that will give me more opportunity to learn and be developed.

As for work situations, trust me, mine is pretty ****e as I may have mentioned before in other posts. For me, the wage is not the deciding factor anymore - I just need to get out of my current situation and if I can start my IT career off then so much the better. Even willing to get a part-time job and work 6 days a week to offset and drop in income.

Ryan - I feel your pain mate but, seeing as you work in a Primary School, perhaps you can give me a bit of an insite, i.e. especially on the SIMS part.

 

SIMS is based around SQL

i dont directly deal with it myself as we have a contract with lancashire county council to fix it if anything goes wrong

they realease an update for it about once a month (sometimes more) which seems to fix one problem but create another

sometimes a very long winded way of installing these updates

on the other hand its fairly simple to use


i suppose like you say your in a slightly different position to me in that you'l be working for the city council as a pose to a specific primary school. Just make sure they offer you some sort of career or personal development oppertunites.

The primary school im working at is trying to hold me back, management wont offer me the chance to do any courses or certs because they know that if i become qualified then theyle have to pay me more else i can leave and get a better paid job, and yet teachers are constantly going on courses etc

annoys me a little that the school has the "investor in people" award when they clearly pick and choose which members of staff they want to invest in.

anyway rant over, i suppose its a good first step working in primary schools

if you **** up on the desktop side of things then it doesnt matter too much as its mostly pupils using the computers anyway, just dont mess up their servers haha

 

You need to a feedback system, email the person who placed the call with short customer survey
form say 6 questions any more & poeple thinks it takes up to much time!

 

Thanks for that Spilly. However, I took the question to mean how would I ensure I was giving a good service i.e. how would I deal with users.

Anybodoy else got any thoughts on this, come on, don't be shy as this could help me get a job!!

 

Hi, I used to work in a School so this might help, have you seen the Edugeek Forums [ http://www.edugeek.net ].
They are a really useful source of information.

I would say there are 2 parts to the question. You provide good customer service the same way you would in any other job dealing with the public. Remember you are providing a service (IT Support) to your customers (teachers\pupils).

1) Answer your phone/emails etc.

2) Don’t make promises unless you WILL keep them.

3) Listen to your customers, Identify their needs, Prioritize.

4) Deal with complaints.

5) Be helpful - even if there’s no immediate profit in it.

6) Train your staff and yourself to be ALWAYS helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable.

7) Take the extra step.

In IT you could also say that you would introduce, or follow a helpdesk system. Monitoring and feedback are essential. Provide an easy central point of contact to log calls. Track customers queries so that you can see how long the problem takes to resolve, look for patterns ie user accounts on server x are playing up etc.

You could talk about SLA's (agreement covering response times eg provide fix within 4 hours) and ITIL (a framework for providing IT support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_level_agreement
http://www.itil.org.uk/what.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Desk_(ITSM)

 

Many thanx for that somabs, was just what I was looking for. The edugeek site looks interesting, might be spending a lot of time on there reading the posts for the next few days