Alex Day
Meet Alex Day
Service Centre Manager Hose & Hydraulics Strood
I have always enjoyed being customer focused, I have spent the past fourteen years providing customers with a service which either meets or exceeds their expectations. I spent 11 years with my previous employer working through different customer services departments which gave me a solid foundation in understanding the core basic principles of maintaining a customer’s expectations to managing teams of people and working to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and measuring the company and staff’s performance.
The experience I had gained interested Jay MacBain, Hydraquip’s Service Director, when we met through Tough Mudders which is an endurance event series, both of us are keen participants of sporting events. Jay had expressed his interests in opening up a centralised customer services department for Hydraquip’s 24/7 breakdown service. I shared my experiences within the service industry and we discussed what would be involved. Shortly after our discussion, I met with Hydraquip’s Managing Director Duncan MacBain and Jay, they presented a plan for opening up a customer services office in Kent which would support its National On Site Mobile Hose Repair Service and offered me the role of a Service Centre Manager. Having grown with my previous employer and working with them in several of their departments for 11 years, it was a tough decision.
After much consideration, I decided to join the Hydraquip team and their venture on creating a centralised customer services team. The ideas put forward were in sync with the methods I would apply, resources and exploring advanced technological processes to ensure procedures and policies are followed through in the most streamlined manner. We used a visionary approach and a strategic thought process to improve the point of contact and address any queries efficiently and effectively. I was very much involved in setting up the team. From when I started, the team has grown considerably and we now employ 10 staff at our call centre in Strood, along with one individual per branch, a further 24 individuals.
The service centre is a very friendly environment, receiving over 1,000 calls in a week which are loaded onto the Job Manager system, with a further few hundred added directly by the customer to the online Job Manager break down job booking portal. The buzz in the office is vibrant and the team are continuously learning products and part numbers whilst on the job. I ensure each individual receives structured training to be able to confidently talk directly to the engineers and customers. We aim to deal with all calls there and then, only one or two may be addressed later that day, such as technical enquiries, once further information has been obtained.
Since I joined Hydraquip, the number of people, resources and the number of responsibilities the service centre team have absorbed have all grown. In addition to analysing the reports I produce from measuring the service centre’s KPIs, I produce reports for our key customers. These reports clearly identify the number of times Hydraquip attended site, what type of breakdown occurred, how long it took for Hydraquip to accept the job, the length of time it took Hydraquip to arrive on site and complete the job. Our customers find these statistics extremely handy to utilise for their own reports.
Managing the team at the service centre and watching it achieve natural growth has been a great accomplishment of mine. I actively take part in problem solving, looking at and implementing changes such as technological processes, new ideas and looking at opportunities to ensure the service centre complements the 24/7 breakdown service.
Monday 3rd June 2019
Meet The Team
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