So far I’ve had fantastic feedback from Lisa and some good feedback from both the customer services spot monitoring and Gary. It’s a good start but given that I act like I’m constantly high on something (like Opera music or blue smarties) I don’t think it’s enough. Saturday involved me upselling five IPPs (Instalment protection plans), we’re being moderated really heavily on them and can get fined £100 if we get it wrong! Gary listened to all of them but also used the first one as a full on monitoring call as I was due another (and he probably decided he needed a laugh).
He was sniggering and giggling the whole way through the call and at one point broke out into laughter, paused the recording and yelled to the whole team what I’d said. The customer had told me I sounded a bit like a game show host; a bit later I’d had to call them back (their phone was running low on batteries or something) and I opened with “Welcome back to the game-show that is Teifion Insurance”. This call warranted a level of “Fantastic” and a large smile from Gary which was pretty nice.
Today however we were told that two of us had been monitored externally, doing well would mean either a bonus of £25 or £100! Doing badly could be either £25 or £50 out of your incentive for the month. Needless to say that when Andrew was told that he was first he was a bit worried; Paul said it was good and Andrew had a good call 
. There were only two calls that had been monitored in this manner so Paul decided to keep us on tenter-hooks and read through the comments omitting names. I figured that some of the stuff was indicative of myself but for the most part it was saying things such as “good upsell” and leaving out things such as “constant sugar rush” so I figured it must be someone else. It was however me and warrented yet another “Fantastic” and £100 on my incentive for either this month or the next one (I can’t remember which it will be).
Today I got some more feedback from work, I think I’ve now accrued enough to share on here just what things people have thought of me. I’ll start by sharing some choice phrases used in relation to my phone manner: exuberant, enthusiastic, funny, customer focused, overpowering, excitable, friendly and overcooked.
My 1-2-1 with Gary at the end of the first month showed me that I need to focus on the Car Hire and IPP upspells, it focused on a few other things but I seem to be at least moving towards those other targets. My Car hire and IPP scores are somewhat lacking at the moment though and I need to redouble my efforts to ensure I hit the targets.
Gary was particularly happy with my customer service, I was always polite yet at the same time built repore at a good rate each call. This was echoed in my customer services spot monitoring where the moderator said that she had actually laughed at the call because I was so funny, the only fault they could find from that perspective was that I talked too fast at some points, so only nine out of ten. From a technical standpoint my calls are so far all green, that means that I’ve not violated FSA requirements, if I did that then I’d start to lose some of my commission pay.
Today I had my next wad of feedback; despite the best efforts of both Gary and Lisa to unnerve me I was confident. Lisa was the one that’d monitored the call and had found it very funny and of high quality. What was rubbish about it was my ability as a salesperson, she showed me where I went wrong and hopefully it won’t happen again.
Better yet I got some comment forms from customers back, they were pretty happy with the service received and I’ve now taken them home. I’ve since decided that I will be taking them back in and filing them in a file that I’ll look at every time I’m feeling bummed after a bad call. I may also put a picture of the cookie monster on the front of the file, just because I can.
So I’ve been working at Admiral for a month and a bit, I’ve got some thoughts about it and as I’ve nothing better to do would post it up here. You may recall that my last post expressed just how happy I am to work at Admiral. Well I’ve had some time to settle in a bit and it’s much the same, I’m still very happy to work for Admiral and I think they’re happy for me to work for them, something about the way that I’m constantly upbeat and enthusiastic.
It’s not without it’s annoyances, I get very little say in what days I work and so do work some weekends when I’d rather not. At the same time though there are some very cool things about it, today I went home half an hour early! I’ll explain: We had a competition where if you managed to get two extras onto a policy then you’d get a go with a small remote control car, you’d race it around the row of desks as fast as possible and whoever had the fastest time half an hour before closing got to go home early. I got 9.6 something and the 2nd place had 11 point something. You can imagine just how humble I was about this.
The other funny thing is that if I’m at a social gathering and people hear I work for Admiral; then the conversation rapidly swings to them asking questions about how things work. The really funny part of that is however that I’m able to answer almost all their questions and that I enjoy doing it!
Finally, I may enjoy the job but am I any good at it? Yes, I got some high stats yet did no overtime! I’m surprised by this as I’ve never done sales jobs before. I’ll be sure to post here at a later date about the situation with my work but I must say it’s pretty good so far