Customers at the centre
Edgetech’s head of marketing Charlotte Mercer explains how taking on an apprentice has helped the firm put ‘customers at the centre’, and do its bit to tackle the skills shortage in the process.
In April, hundreds of businesses around the country marked National Apprenticeship Week, an acknowledgement of the huge economic contribution apprentices make, and their vital role in ensuring so many British industries continue to thrive.
And it won’t be long before we’ll be having a celebration of our own. This month [May 2019], it’ll be a year since Ellie, our business administration apprentice, first joined Edgetech’s marketing department.
We’ve invested in our industry and its future – we were an early supporter of the Building Our Skills initiative, an ongoing campaign to help attract talented young people for careers in fenestration. This made taking on an apprentice an obvious choice, especially given the scale of the skills shortage UK construction is facing.
Ellie has come a long way in the space of ten months. We’ve structured her tasks to give her experience in as wide a range of areas as possible, everything from answering the phones and conducting customer interviews to presentations and even working on a stand at an exhibition in India.
In return, employing Ellie has allowed us to make changes behind the scenes that will help us better deliver one of our key commitments for the years ahead: ‘customers at the centre’.
At Edgetech, we’ve always prided ourselves on the service we provide. But in the decade ahead, we want to go even further, and ‘customers at the centre’ is our commitment to put them at the heart of everything we do.
When Ellie’s apprenticeship finishes, we’ll be taking her on as a full-time marketing assistant. This has enabled us to develop another key member of the team, Krishma Patel, who moves into the expanded role of customer experience and marketing co-ordinator.
Krishma will be in daily contact with our key customers, and driving a number of major new customer support projects we’re working on behind the scenes, some of which we’re launching at the FIT Show. The result will be a faster, more responsive service while retaining the personal relationships that our customers value from us.
In short, the positive ripple effects of taking on an apprentice have already been substantial.
We’ve helped bring young talent into the industry, gained an enthusiastic new member of our team, been able to develop other key employees, and become even more customer-centric as a result.
