You are not alone - do you need to ask for help?

Customer Service is about people and how you make them feel.

It’s about recognising when things aren’t right and taking action which does not fit within the “rule book”.

Let me explain what I mean.

I noticed that we were receiving an unusually high number of requests for assistance from a highly experienced administrator. On investigation, she was frequently making small errors when ordering searches and needed help to rectify her mistakes.

I picked up the phone and talked to her about her workload and how she was coping during lockdown and she admitted she wasn’t coping at all well.

She was working from home with little supervision as many of us are at this time. However, unlike fee earners, her hours were not being recorded and no one had noticed that she was working long into the evenings and during weekends just to keep on top of things. Naturally this was taking a toll on her mental health as well as her ability to carry out her normal duties and it was inevitable that mistakes would begin to occur. Worse still, the frequency of mistakes began to affect her confidence to get the simplest tasks done correctly so she became more and more dependent upon our assistance.

Not wishing to draw negative attention to her errors, anxious to retain her job and to appear competent, she asked us to help her resolve any problems behind the scenes.

The last thing she wanted was for someone to blow the whistle and report the number of her errors to her manager, but I was very worried about her and wanted to get her the best support possible. I was torn between betraying her confidence and informing her Head of Department, but I knew that without help, her situation would only get worse.

I did the latter and I am pleased to say there was a happy ending. The Head of Department was so grateful that I had taken the time to contact her and that we had put the welfare of her staff first. She admitted that it was a challenge to monitor the hours her support staff were working when home-based and clearly this was a wake-up call for them.

The administrator got extra help and support as well as some much-needed time off and thanked me for ignoring her plea for secrecy.

While we find our way through these uncertain times, we want our customers to know that we care, we understand and above all, we want to help.