Hi, I’m Emily, the newly appointed Marketing Manager at Lemon Business Solutions. As an introduction to the business, I spent a day in the life of an operator, taking the phone calls for an absence management company and two lift companies.
Lemon are the leading customer service outsource provider for the lift industry, assisting some of the largest lift companies in the UK. If you’re stuck in a lift, there’s a good chance that you would be speaking to the team @ Lemon to help get you out!
I thought it would be good to share with you what I experienced and learned:
It was a 9 am start on a Saturday morning, I'd had all of the high-quality training for the companies I was about to work on, I’d sat with experienced callers to listen in and I’d completed tests to confirm my competency, but I was still so nervous. I was about to represent not only Lemon Business Solutions but also these companies and look after their customers for the day.
I experienced my first ever entrapment within a lift, the adrenalin set in and I had to remember my training, their getting out was my responsibility and I couldn’t mess it up! Still armed with my information sheet I took down all of the information, name, location, which lift they were in and then I was off - “ENTRAPMENT” I called through the contact centre, I watched the board behind me, waiting for my name to disappear, that way I knew it had been passed to an engineer and they were going to be free soon!
Whilst I was a little panicked by this, my colleagues just went about their business calmly and quietly, as, after all, they were used to this. In fact, the contact centre is remarkably such a calm environment as this was just business as usual for everybody else.
I thought about that person all day, and into the evening, I thought about how I would feel if I was in their situation and hoping I’d done everything right, leading to a speedy rescue from the lift they were in.
After a few false alarms in the lifts and the usual absence calls, cough, cold etc. came an emotional rollercoaster of calls, the first caller had lost their grandparent, and I could hear the pain in their voice as they explained the reason for not going to work, the second caller was undergoing another round of chemotherapy and they knew they were going to be unwell. Trying to comfort a complete stranger, knowing the right things to say without overstepping is a skill in its self, I knew I had a job to do in taking down the relevant information but these people needed someone to listen and someone to be compassionate towards their situation, not a robot to take the details and hang up. After all, our strapline at Lemon is ‘real people, real conversations', which is often greatly appreciated by our client’s customers.
Along with our other values of quality, trust, team, passion and gratitude, empathy plays such a huge part in everything that Lemon do every day, our team members are hired based on their alignment with our values and after my experience with these calls, I can completely understand why. To provide the best service possible we must hire the best people. To put yourself in the shoes of others and respond accordingly is an essential quality of a Lemon.
I guess I wanted to write this blog to show my sincere admiration for my fellow Lemons, I already knew how hard they worked but doing it myself for just one day showed me exactly what they can be faced with day in, day out, and they still have the biggest smiles on their faces, talk about how much they love working for Lemon and come in every day ready to go!
I can absolutely see why though, aside from the amazing team, the support from Lemon and the great environment; it is so rewarding to know you made a positive difference to someone’s day. In my case, I helped a person trapped in a lift, I listened to two emotionally distressed individuals, let their employers know they wouldn’t be in and gave them as much support as I possibly could, and they both thanked me for it. That would be enough for me to get out of bed every day and continue to be an operator at Lemon.
I am so grateful for the experience that I had. I can safely say that our client’s customers are in the safest of hands.
