The Schools Plus Customer Contact Centre, found in sunny Bournemouth, is home to a few different company departments including the Sales and Marketing team, our Finance and Renewals experts and the Enquiries team.
Our Enquiries team are the highly skilled and highly professional customer service experts that facilitate your booking requests from first initial enquiry to final confirmation. This busy team is overseen by Team Leader, Sophie Beresford.
We managed to quickly sit down with Sophie, somewhere between her 50th phone call and 60th email of the day, and asked her to take us through a typical day in the life for her as Team Leader at the Customer Contact Centre…
8:30am – 9am:
The day usually starts with an enquiry’s morning meeting, updating my team on any potential issues and training points whilst discussing any topics which may be brought to the table. Whether that’s questions on a new school or a facility or discussing any potential improvements. After the meeting, I wrap up the previous day by tallying the sales total, calls and emails whilst removing any spam from the enquiry’s inbox.
9am – 12pm:
The phones turn on and that is usually go in our office! We’re never a quiet team, even on a slower day there is always something to do. We begin answering the emails in the box working off a simple colour code for efficiency so the same person usually completes the booking from start to finish as there can be quite a few different variables in each enquiry.
Once the team is up and running, I usually then pop off the shared inbox and onto my personal schools plus account and begin answering more internal emails and building complex contracts. Once I am all up to date, I am back with the team.
During the morning is usually when the post arrives. It is my responsibility to deal with, sort or refer anything which arrives at our head office.
12pm – 2pm:
Lunch time for the Customer Contact Centre! We usually split this directly in half and have two people working on the phones, whilst the other two take lunch and then swapping over. The operatives not on lunch diligently prioritise as many phone calls as they can during these two hours. We understand this is when many of our customers have lunch breaks too and is rather the opportune time for them to ring.
3pm – 5pm:
After lunch we are back up and running at full capacity and I am answering questions from my team as we work together to answer the emails in the inbox and the telephone calls coming through to the Customer Contact Centre. We also take all the telephone calls for our Finance department during the afternoon, so we are always a little busier. We wrap up as much as we can before 5pm and we head home, ready to do it all again the next day!
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Thanks to Sophie for giving us a snapshot of a typical working day for her and her team in the Customer Contact Centre. We hoped you enjoyed a glimpse into a busy Schools Plus day.
Although Sophie is often multitasking, don’t think this means she is any less committed to providing the same level of service excellence that her team and everyone else at the Customer Contact Centre does!
Keep your eyes peeled for more Day in The Life blogs in the future…
