There may be a few blog posts around on customer contact from a sales and marketing point of view, but not so many on the other points of contact a company has with their customers, which can be overlooked. Not everyone who deals with customers has a voice to talk about what they do – the work of support teams and finance teams with their clients often remain isolated incidents, unvalued, unobserved, locked away from the world with nothing but that physicist’s cat for company.

Today it’s the turn of the humble receptionist. I’ve worked at the reception desk in Red Gate for two months. I’m often the first point of contact people have with the company. The variety of calls can make the job interesting and satisfying, but it can also be rather precarious at times, particularly if people don’t realize they’re talking to a mere receptionist. Sometimes callers will presume a lot of knowledge and power that, much as I might covet it, I don’t quite have just yet.

It’s fortunate that Red Gate seems to be quite good at what it does. Given the importance of what our software gets used for, the number of baleful callers telephoning to berate us for some criminal oversight seems incredibly low, hovering steadily at about zero (that I’ve encountered myself, I hasten to add). This makes things rather more pleasant than I feared they might be at the start.

The vast majority of calls will be straightforward. Customers phone up with questions about bills and licenses; potential customers phone asking what our software does and whether it will do it for them; tech support issues phone up in a tired, bewildered or defeated voice; and wrong numbers call to demand – with implacable ferocity – a decent explanation as to why their furniture hasn’t arrived. (Well, once.) They all get passed through to the right departments or furniture companies.

The straightforward calls are rarely the interesting ones, though. Calls become interesting when someone needing tech support thinks they’re straight through to an engineer, and in the first sentence launches into an explanation that makes a lovely whizzing sound as it goes over my head. (Like deadlines, but higher pitched.) Generally at the first pause for breath I let them know that the particular software they need help with isn’t something I know in great depth, so I’ll pass them through to someone who knows it better than me… It’s a nice way of learning about the products, however. I will see how many snippets of data I need to collect before I don’t have to pass people through to support any more.

Other calls can be stranger. Some are trying to sell things to the company, and generally ask to speak to heads of department. One chap didn’t, and gave me his entire sales pitch for some web analytics software shortly following ‘Hello’, despite a number of suggestions that I wasn’t altogether the right person. He seemed to be putting his heart and soul into it, and almost believing himself when he said they were a market leader – I didn’t have the heart to stop him. His sales pitch seemed to be fluff held together with buzzwords and enthusiasm. The poor man sounded like he knew.

Most rewarding are the calls where the first thing the customer does is to tell me how happy they’ve been with Red Gate – the products themselves, and the service. I wouldn’t believe there would have been so many of these if I hadn’t heard them myself. Most are from customers who’ve been with us a good number of years, but a significant number are from those who’ve just starting using our software and are over the moon at how much easier things have become. Brand new users have even told me how pleased they are with the software at the same time as they’re phoning in for tech support to work out a few programming eccentricities.

Sitting in at the desk in the office itself, the atmosphere is great. Most of the company walks past the desk at some point in the day, and you get to say hello to people every minute or two. Plenty will stop for a chat, if there’s a quiet moment. Red Gate is an unusually friendly company. People are genuinely happy to be there, and working at the reception desk in the middle of an atmosphere of peace and contentment is really quite luxurious. Particularly with a fresh cup of tea and one of those yoghurts with the little chocolate biscuit things from the kitchens.

Post by Phil Scott