I had a phone interview where I didn’t connect well with the person. There were a few misunderstandings. Is there anything I can now do?
Here is one example. We role played where she called me and needed tech support. She had stressed the fact that there were no trick questions and if I didn’t know a technology we could do a different example. I isolated the problem to being the router. I asked which lights were on and she said there were no lights; I took this to mean there physically were no lights but she meant they were all off. I also told her to make sure it had power and to check the cables were secure. She said there was a white cable connected to the wall but after we finished she said that was just the Ethernet cable and the power cable came unplugged. In such situations should I argue my point or explain why I got confused? I know in support related roles the customer can be very unknowledgeable but it’s unlikely they would say the device is plugged in when it’s not, especially when she said it’s not a trick question.
I’m thinking of sending an email along the lines of “thanks for taking the time to interview me today. Sorry I misunderstood the status of the router, I think I know a lot more about routers than I made clear in the interview today”.
The interviewer suddenly stopped the "role playing" and asked why I didn't follow up with the no lights. I explained when she said it had no lights, I thought it meant there physically were none, not that they were off. Also I did say to check all cables, and to say "one is connected to the wall" does not necessarily imply it was not getting power. Now, if I had some basic training in new that all of this companies routers had lights, this would have been easy.
She also got me to talk about a time when I went above and beyond in providing service. I told her about a time where someone had a problem that kept coming back where a printer got disconnected and I stayed late to find the root cause of the problem and fix it so it wouldn’t come back.* She said the person must have been upset with me that the problem kept coming back. I said she wasn’t but offered to talk about a time I had to deal with an angry person. I gave the example of when I worked as a telemarketer and people got mad that I was calling them to try to get their money. She said “why did they get mad when you called them?” … how could a person not understand why it would be annoying for a telemarketer to call them? This is what I mean by not connecting well. Is there anything I can do at this point?
*the user was trying to print from a guest operating system in VMware and things were funky with the USB pass through with the host OS. Basically VMware reset the USB pass through settings each time the host was rebooted so I wrote a script to fix this.
