My First Week of Employment in Health and Safety

My first week of Employment @ SHEilds

As always starting a new job can be scary, or even frightening. It was for me considering I was going to be working in a completely new environment compared to the position I held in my previous job. However, on my first day working at SHEilds I felt different, a good different as it wasn’t like anything I had experienced before. I expected it to be familiar, even normal, the type of role where you would sit there quietly all day and stare at a screen. Boy was I surprised, it had some excitement to it, I get on with everyone in the office, working with NEBOSH eLearning Courses & IOSH eLearning Courses and they accepted me instantly, at no point was I left out…I was brought in into the SHEilds Family where it’s nice, warm and welcoming.

I didn’t get introduced into my set role instantly as I had to undergo training to achieve a certain level of knowledge as I was to be working as the digital front of house team member, my role is dealing with customers in real time through a live chat facility on the SHEilds website. This role changes minute by minute, I have to help people with day to day questions; questions range from providing course specific information to the exchange rate between pound sterling and Ghanaian Cedi. Regardless of the nature of the customer’s query I needed to answer them quickly and efficiently whilst maintaining a professional, polite demeanour.

The training I undertook was researching the company website (I found this very easy as a superb job from our IT Department was done by making the site extremely user friendly). I was then given small tasks such as creating questionnaires of typical questions I felt were most likely to be asked by customers. I then sat with my team leaders and they evaluated & advised on my answers and the structure in which it was presented. We then created my answers as pre-populated shortcuts to aid my communications with customers. This process is ongoing and we continually review and adapt as required.

Researching may seem boring to some but in the long run it really helps you out, just gaining that sense of knowledge for when you are asked something and you know yourself in your head you can answer his/her question.

Makes you feel proud!

I finished a full day interacting with our client via our websites live chat feature, I was exhausted and worn out from the amount of enquires I had thrown at me. Before the day ended I had a quick debrief with my line manager who gave me a review of my recent chats and explained what each of the statistics meant and what my KPI’s would be. The showed admiration towards me and praised me on how well I had done and commented on the way I had responded to the customers. The only downside was my response time although as he stated this would come with time and practice.

It was on the third day when I got to put some of my training into practice, I started talking to real life customers; it was an experience, the amount of visitors to the site who had enquiries was crazy. I quickly realised how demanding this role could be, but as the nature of the enquirers constantly changed it showed just how important the training I had undertaken was. I had the help of staff to assist me with some of the trickier questions I got asked about the courses. I quickly added these questions to my lists along with ideal answers and learnt them in my quiet times so I was continuously developing myself to the point where I could answer them with ease. Over the next few days I was still unsure on some questions however I had help from the team almost instantly as I asked them. During really busy periods one of the team logged on and helped by sharing the workload.

During the rest of the week I was asked to help with a few other jobs between customer interactions. I was involved in printing revision notes for classroom students; printing various information SHEilds supplied me with and filed them into a quick reference folder for my desk. This quick reference folder really makes my life easier and ensures the customers are happy.

At the end of my final day of my first week I knew I was going to fit in easily both with my new job role and with my new work family.

This is the first job at which I look forward to Mondays and I look forward to continuously assisting our clients and potential clients, feel free to chat with me here.