Customer advisor
Once I’ve signed and clocked in, my day starts by opening up the programmes I’ll use during the course of the day. I work 9am to 5pm, but we have lots of people in the team who work part-time and do all sorts of different work patterns to fit around their commitments and meet the needs of the business.
The key applications I use all day every day are a database containing customers’ details, email and our Daily Bulletin Board.
The Bulletin board is an essential starting point. On there are
• My key performance indicator (KPI) statistics for the previous day
• My KPIs/individual targets for today;
• Details of anything which could prompt customers to call e.g. if there has been a mains burst;
• Updates on policies and procedures, and
• Details of any information that was issued previously, which we can search for.
In addition to the information to do your job, the managers put notes of thanks on there, let everyone know if someone changes job, ask if people want to swap shifts to cover leave requests and put details of plans of events such as one we’ve got this Saturday for a breakfast to raise money for cancer research … it is certainly something you need to keep a close eye on for many reasons.
Once I’ve read the bulletin board and am ready to go, I log onto the phone system and make myself available to customer contact. I handle approximately 80 – 100 calls each day. We are the front line as our telephone number is on everyone’s water bill so you never know what the next call entails. The majority of the calls are straightforward, however, sometimes people are frustrated because they don’t understand information they’ve been sent or they’ve got a leak or are having financial difficulties, but by listening to their problems and offering solutions they then calm down and then we can resolve the problem for them – almost all of my work is dealing with in bound calls.
One of the best things about the job for me is the variety, I could be dealing with a query on a bill, talking to a customer who is in arrears with their water bill, taking a payment from someone or discussing the benefits of a water meter the next.
We try to deal with as many of the calls as we can ourselves, but may need to pass them on to the Debt Management team or the Administration team who specialise with these types of enquiries. At the moment I’m involved in a trial to try to minimise even further the amount of calls that are passed on to another department – we are really trying to achieve “Right first time, every time” to give our customers the best possible service.
We have to record on the database each call we take every day, so the phone system allows you time to do your update and to take any action necessary eg if a customer is moving house, we wouldn’t keep them on the phone whilst we closed their existing account and opened another, we would take all the details we need from them and then do the necessary paperwork etc. once they were off the phone.
In between calls we also get involved in administration, doing things such as liaising with Anglian Water, who deal with the wastewater in our area, looking at whether customers direct debits are set up at an appropriate level and occasionally when demand is high we even fill envelopes for mail shots. We record anything we do outside of the database on a tally sheet at the end of each day.
When joining the company you undertake 6 weeks of training in a classroom environment with professional trainers, once training has then completed you are then ready to take calls within the call centre, for the first 2 weeks in the call centre you are mentored by an experienced advisor who then supports, guides & helps with any questions you may have during this time. We then have regular training updates within the company and also an external customer service course which gives an independent assessment of our training programmes.
It’s a pretty busy job which makes the days go quickly and we have a good, friendly team. I’ve been here for more than two years now and really enjoy it.