National Customer Service Week - The Changing World of Work

This week we celebrate National Customer Service Week 2021. This is an annual celebration organised by The Institute of Customer Service to recognise and reward Customer Service staff across all businesses, while showing recognition to the hard work and commitment teams offer their companies daily.

Across the week we will be recognising our very own champions and heroes here at Covernet. Throughout the week there are different themes covering all aspects of Customer Service, what it means, how it contributes to the business and the essential skills it takes to deliver truly great customer service.

To kick things off for the week and set the scene, Monday’s theme is ‘The Changing World of Work’.

In March 2020 the Covernet team like every other business across the world transformed our working environment. Overnight we transformed from a workforce of 20+ members mostly working in the one office location in Coleraine to working remotely from our homes, whether this be in our kitchen, dining room, bedroom, or a quick makeshift office space.

Thankfully we were very fortunate to have been able to make the smooth transition in less than 24 hours with the valuable support of our IT team, who worked directly with Senior Management to effectively, and seamlessly, make the move.

As we pivoted and adapted to work from our home environments, we were acutely aware that the personal circumstances for staff would vary and many now were left with no choice but to juggle their fulltime jobs alongside the demands of childcare and home-schooling on top of the new uncertainties facing everyone as the pandemic unfolded.

Throughout this phase we understood it was important to keep communication channels open and we aimed to maintain a certain level of normality as it would have been back in the office. We set up recurring daily calls, appointed Covid Champions and introduced Mental Health Heroes and expanded our Social Committee.
Our Social Committee has been very active within our business for many years now and the team work to plan and organise fundraisers across the yearly calendar in support of our chosen charity, chosen by our people.

For 2020-2021 we have been delighted to raise funds for Northern Ireland Children’s Hospice. Together each of these groups of champions and heroes helped keep everyone connected and we were pleased to continue to raise funds for our chosen charity as former in-person team fundraising events became virtual events. We found these fundraising activities an excellent way to remain connected with the team aside from ongoing work projects.

As providers of web hosted software, we are proud that our clients didn’t suffer any disruption or down time and all clients continued to access the system remotely as they normally would. This coupled with our staff’s continued high level of customer service meant we were lucky to experience no issues during the shift to remote working. Many of our clients have praised our team and business who continued to provide excellent customer service ….

We knew how successfully we transitioned to remote, but it is very encouraging and welcoming to hear clients express that the high level of customer service was not affected. Our staff have also positively commented on the new working arrangements, with some claiming productivity levels have increased. We were delighted to become exposed to this feedback following a recent staff survey conducted as part of Great Place to Work UK Certification. As a result of this audit, we are pleased to say we are officially recognised as a Great Place to Work 2021-22. Read our staff feedback….

These comments reinforce our very agile workforce at Covernet and today we recognise their efforts in ensuring our clients’ needs and requirements are met to a high standard.