We thought the pandemic was a challenge to providing great customer service. But this post-pandemic world has brought with it even more challenges. Our customers are significantly affected by the cost of living crisis, mental health is at an all time low and services are dwindling in the communities.
Our customer contact team continues to be the central hub at Abri, supporting customer queries and directing actions to the rest of the business to deliver our housing services. But increasingly, we’re seeing customers turn to us, their landlord, for help with personal and financial issues too, some in very distressing situations. The team are now having to support customers with their mental health, sometimes handling serious risks, and are making foodbank referrals most days, when this used to be fewer than once a month. As a result, we’re having to adapt our services, and ensure our colleagues are equipped to face challenging conversations and continue to be treated with respect to provide the support our customers need.
The role of a Customer Contact advisor has always been complex, but this has only been magnified by the pressures being experienced across society. The team have dealt with calls ranging from parents who are unable to feed their children to individuals suffering so badly with their mental health, that they’re considering taking their own life. All the while the team are still responding to an average of 30,000 contacts every month, balancing the need to meet our obligations and everyday responsibilities as a landlord with going that extra mile to support customers in need.
Over the last few months, Abri’s customer contact team have received mental health training from an external provider to help them recognise when a customer might be struggling or going through a mental health crisis, and identifying ways we can help. This could be by referring them to our Tenancy Support Services to help them sustain their tenancy or assess what they're entitled to, or to specialist providers in their local community. The training also provided colleagues with ways to look after their own mental health. Abri’s own Community Safety team have also provided training on how to identify anger vs abuse and ways to how to handle this. And because the skill set advisors need has changed, with more focus on emotional intelligence, we’re looking at the role play content we use at recruitment assessment days to include more realistic scenarios to ensure the right people are in the role, for our customers’ and our colleagues’ wellbeing.
It’s really important that we not only look after our customers, but also our colleagues whose resilience continues to be tested and their knowledge expected to expand to meet the needs of our customers and provide a great customer service.
This National Customer Service Week we’ve been holding open days, where colleagues can shadow customer service advisors to better understand what our customers are experiencing, how much we’re required to help and the need to ensure our contact centre remains a service with respect.
- Tom Ramadan, Head of Customer Contact at Abri