customer service advisor Review

On a day-to-day basis I answer a wide range calls from customers with personal accounts calling the bank to handle their queries. The queries for these customers can vary from requesting to close an account, to reactivating a dormant (old and unused) account to checking an account balance for the customer.

During this apprenticeship, there has been 4 lots of sufficient and useful training to encourage us to improve and enhance in our job role. My favourite training was the soft skills training which I participated in at the end of summer to improve my communication with Santander customers when they call.

I did not enjoy the programme very much as the work is very unorganised and the job itself is very tedious by taking the same calls regularly- I know there is nothing much we can do about this! I work with a good and very fun team that makes the work and the calls more enjoyable.

The work on the programme was very unorganised with no structure for a very long time and even now going through gateway the work is only just becoming more organised and starting to see where we are at with this. It has been very confusing and definitely could have been simpler .

At Santander, the team managers supported the apprentices with as much as they could regarding the work. A lot of the time we did not need much support from them but when we did BPP made this very difficult for the team and the managers to understand the situation also.

With the training programme and qualification, there has been a lot of confusion about the work such as what we are doing and who we need to report to. This is because during the time on the apprenticeship we have had up to three different trainers to discuss work with.

As a customer service advisor, the soft skills training I was able to complete was definitely worth attending. From this training which is only currently offered to apprentices, I did learn how to cope with angry and upset customers who have an issue or problem from the bank in other ways.

At Santander, there is an opportunity to join many different sports teams such as football and running which encourages team morale and friendly competition between departments sometimes- such as the Santander 5 a side event against other teams around the country in other contact centres. Other opportunities are being part of a network ie women in business.

Yes

Santander is always professional as any work place should be such as treating not just their customers fairly but their staff also. A really great aspect of working at Santander is also that we get many weeks of training to feel confident enough for when we take our first call.

For anybody applying to work with us in the bank I would advise that they take every opportunity to show off their skills learnt so that they can develop their career such as becoming a mentor or a manager - we have been told that these are very good roles to get to climb the ladder in our careers.