Client Support Officer, Lesley Angus, joined ReferAll in August from a large medical practice, where she had been the onsite support and liaison for the clinical system. Working in an intimate open plan office, handling customer queries presented her and Commercial Director, Stu Stokes, with an interesting training challenge….
As a new addition to an incredibly busy, small team it could have been daunting getting up to speed with ReferAll’s system, which is designed and built in-house by the people I work with. Training is really tricky in this situation: You know you need to ask questions but don’t want to take up too much of people’s time. Stu came up with this ingenious solution which we call the ‘swing by’.
The process was really simple: a query would come through which I wasn’t sure about. If it was urgent I would put a note on the query and then ‘swing by’ Stu’s desk. He could then run through the process of investigating why something had happened and give me an overview of how the system worked from a customer’s point of view.
Since there introduction 'swing bys' have helped us share ideas and information about upcoming projects. A great example is the creation of internal Account Managers, who now take a responsibility for a set number of customers. This has created closer relationships with customers and means we support then even better. We have also improved our support requests, or 'ticketing' system by creating new 'ticket' types and refining processes.
One great feature of the ‘swing by’ is I’m really aware of my own progress as the months have gone on. The ‘swing by's’ aren’t as frequent as they once were, which means I am gradually building up my knowledge.
From Stu’s perspective, he knows I’m getting the support I need but has had fewer interruptions. It isn’t rocket science but has worked really well for us. Generally I still have one ‘swing by’ each day and actually we’ve found over the months that everyone in the office benefits, whether they’re new or experienced because we are all, always, learning. I am definitely fan!