Fi’s desk

When I got back to my team, Fiona, Dave and Suzy were in. Fiona however was running around frantically trying to organise herself.

I tried to sound chirpy; “Morning team! Trust you all had a good weekend.”

“Are you sitting at my desk Gordon?” Fiona liked order. Perhaps being that bit older, she was more set in her ways; she liked what worked for her and tried to keep it that way.

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“Yes, Fi, my PC has died and won’t be brought back to life for three days, so I’ll have to sit there. I moved a few items over there – they are in the same order as they were.”

“I’m supposed to be covering the phones in thirty seconds and I am still logging onto Meeshell’s machine. And all my notes and scripts aren’t where I am used to, I can’t find my calculator, Post-it pad, or my orange pen.” Fiona was panicking that she wouldn’t be logged on by 9 a.m. She dumped herself down on the seat and started adjusting it. “Can I swap this for my usual seat please, it took me ages to get it set up the way I like it. And I need my mobile phone charger as it’s about to die on me.”

I just about managed to keep up with the fast flowing monologue. Boy can she talk, which is of course one of the reasons she works in my team.“Yes, to the seat, and the charger. Here’s your pen; Apologies. Dave, are you logged on?”

“Jus checkin’ the email.”  He said, focused on the screen and tapping away at the keyboard.

“Never mind the email. Please log on to take calls for the first five minutes whilst Fiona has time to re-organise. And when Meeshell turns up, ask her to sit at the spare one over there.”

“Yes, boss.” Dave, always eager to please, duly logged on ready to take the first call at 9 a.m. “Guys, we have another dropped voicemail. Looks like someone phoned us about ten minutes ago. No message though.”

“Ah, yes that was Andy, my boss, checking to see if we were doing our job?”

Dave looked over at me. For a brief second, he looked curious as to why. “Okay boss, will delete it. I won’t record it”

“Fine. No wait. Mark it down as a lost call.”

“But it was from your boss, before 9 a.m.”

“I’ll explain in a minute”. Dave returned to the voicemail and deleted the call. He did however capture it as a missed call.

“Thanks Gordon, I’ll get on the phone as quickly as I can.”  Fiona now seemed to be sitting under the desk. I guessed there was a good reason so I let her carry on, and turned to Suzy.

“Suzy. What do you have to do this morning?”

“There’s a bunch of customer exit calls to make from last week. I just didn’t get time to do them. And you wanted me to review the wording on the letter we send out to those wanting to close their bank accounts. Should take most of the morning.”

“Right. Be flexible I may need you for an hour or so later on.”

“Something exciting?” Suzy smiled. She was often quite funny with her take on life, and she seemed to excel and making light of the more awkward situations our team had to deal with. And she did love to wear those bright pink and purple coloured tops in the middle of winter. We men tended to stick to the standard dark suit or dark pinstripe. Few of us dared wear even a bright shirt.

I laughed at her choice of words. Exciting was not the word I would have used. I sat down in Fiona’s seat, and started to adjust it more to my liking. Before bringing the team up to speed, I needed to sort it out in my own head. I opened up a spreadsheet and jotted down the key things:

• Caroline – Grp dep CEO – impressive.
• Andy – under pressure
• UK operations under scrutiny
• Short term pressure – four months to get back on target?
• Customer Services to deliver
• Anne, Jim, myself under spotlight.
• 8-8 customer service required by my team
• New customer service metric – need to answer phone quicker.

Dave’s phone rang; the first customer of the new week wanting to cancel. Dave started to take the details and trying to find out why they wanted to leave. I tried to block out the conversation but, to be honest, I was struggling. Perhaps it was something to do with the Australian accent. As I went over the meeting in my mind, I felt something was missing.

Fiona logged on and immediately got caller number two. Yet more noise, and more distraction! I wasn’t used to this open space and temporarily retreated back into my office.

So how do I put a positive spin on this? I’ll be asking my team to do some form of shift pattern, which they probably will hate, but that will get in the way of the other initiatives. And ultimately I’m not sure it will make a lot of difference to the customer.

I gazed off into the distance. A jumbo-jet gracefully turned for finals into Heathrow. I watched it line up and prepare for the end of the journey, flying over the rooftops, past Tower Bridge and, just visible in the distant haze, past the Houses of Parliament.

Having had a less than good start to the week, I reflected on the bigger world. The world keeps on going with people leading their purposeful lives around the globe, largely irrespective of what I, or my company, did. Answering the phone more quickly to a cancelling customer was not going to turn around Warrender. Those millions of Londoners did not care about service standards – just the standard of service they got.

How many of those economy or traveller class jumbo customers were happy with their flight to London? Had the in-flight meal met their expectations? Was the movie choice any good? Did the business fliers value the seat that turned into a bed? Or was it a feature that didn’t add value? How did an airline know it was doing well?

Time to break the news. I dithered briefly over whether this was better done in my environment or theirs? I returned to Fi’s desk.