BJS In Conversation With… Amy Irvine, Customer Care Advisor, at BJS Delivery DistributionWe live in a transactional, fast-paced age and in the world of business, especially, the human aspect often gets lost. For many companies, figures and statistics begin to take over, and if you’re not careful then the whole environment can end up feeling incredibly corporate, sterile even. At the end of the day, though, it’s the people within a company that gives it its lifeblood, the gears that make it tick. Regardless of the advances in technology or the smart savings made in the accounts department, a firm is nothing without its family.Nowhere is this personality more apparent than within the customer-facing areas of a business - the call centres, for example. I recently spoke to Amy Irvine, Customer Care Advisor here at BJS, about a trip she had to the company’s India-based office a couple of years ago. I wanted to find out more about the visit, as well as the kind of personality that she thinks is necessary within those kinds of roles.A Formative ExperienceBack in October 2017, as part of her then-role as Stock Admin Manager, Amy took a trip over to India to train two new team members at the office situated there. “It wasn’t the kind of work where you could easily train people, remotely,” Amy starts to explain. “It was just much easier for a few of us to go out there and train them, in-person, rather than from opposite ends of the world.”It became apparent early on, hearing her enthusiasm over the phone, that Amy had found the entire experience memorable, to say the least. “I don’t think I’d ever been on a long-haul flight before then, but now I’ve absolutely caught the travel bug,” She says.“When the flight touched down in Delhi we still had an almost five-hour drive to Chandigarh, where the BJS office is situated. The roads were just manic,” She says. “Absolutely crazy. I don’t think I’d ever heard so many horns blaring. And then you had cows on the road at the same time just doing their own thing, there was just so much going on!”“Our cab driver was smiling and having a joke with me because he said that this was him driving calmly,” Amy laughs. “He said that I was lucky to have a seatbelt that worked because a lot of cabs didn’t, but it wasn’t anywhere near as reassuring as I think he thought it was!”What Stuck Out Most During The Trip?“Firstly, the culture. It’s just the most colourful and vibrant country you could possibly wish to travel to. You have these ideas in your head going out there that it’s probably going to be something like that - from what you’ve seen in films and TV and that kind of thing. But nothing compares to when you actually arrive. It’s fantastic.”DowntimeWas it all work, then? Not quite…“We had a couple of days where we weren’t working where we could do the typical ‘tourist’ stuff. We got to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, celebrate Diwali in the BJS office and, of course, have the mandatory ride in a tuk-tuk.

“Secondly, it’s the people there. Everyone I met was incredibly warm, welcoming and just so smiley. There’s this positivity that everyone just seems to exude out there. We did see a lot of poverty, though, as well. And there’s this mismatch you can’t quite get your head around, this disconnect between the ‘picture-perfect’ tourism on one hand, and the level of poverty on the other.”

“But people just seemed to manage to stay positive, in spite of this, regardless of their situation. The trip certainly put things in perspective for me, and all I can say is that if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person heading out to India, then you won’t be when you get back!”The Thing About Call Centres…People tend to have preconceived notions surrounding call centre workers. They associate them with being unemotional - some might even say robotic. According to Amy, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth.“With both my experiences here in the UK, and when I was over on my trip in India, I can say hand-on-heart that the employees manning the phones are by far and away some of the most personable and attentive I’ve ever come across.

“These aren’t people just following a set script - which is what a lot of people seem to think,” Amy says. “They’re not ignoring what’s being said to them, they’re not just ‘going through the motions’. These are people that want to make a difference - that want to listen and actively help.”Building Relationships Brick By BrickAmy’s moved around the company a fair bit in her six years with BJS – from Stock Admin to the Returns Warehouse, and to where she is now as Customer Care Advisor (there’s more than a few departments at a delivery distribution company!) I asked her what she liked most about her current role?“I’ve got a bit more freedom now,” Amy says. “A bit more time and license to build relationships with clients, which is really nice. You quickly get a rapport going and you know that you can help them and likewise they can help you. I think that’s one of the things that’s so impressive about call centre teams, generally. They’re having to essentially build a complete relationship in the space of often only a few minutes. That’s a pretty special kind of personality that’s able to do that, I think.”

“It all comes back to the people,” She goes on. “Whether it’s someone in the customer care team with a headset on - either here or over in India, or whether it’s the teams out on the road, this is a company that’s first and foremost people-driven. You’d hope that’s the same with every company, but who knows!”Contact UsSo, if you’d like to find out more about our delivery distribution company, then get in touch! Contact BJS Home Delivery today on 01922 645 650.