A day in the life of: Paul Overend, Customer Services Manager
Paul Overend has just celebrated his fifteenth anniversary with the company, having been part of the BIDS team acquired by Ingenta back in 1998. As Customer Services Manager, he manages a team based in Bath (UK) and Providence (Rhode Island, US). Here, he tells us about an average day at work:
"I arrive at Ingenta's Bath office at about 8am, after a brisk 10 minute walk to work. Riverside Court is a modern building on the banks of the river Avon in the historic city of Bath. From my desk, if I peek over the head of my colleague Claire Hill, I can just catch sight of the river below.
My first job is to process the subscription requests that have arrived overnight, and manually check those which have failed to be automatically activated. Claire and I then get on with sorting the overnight emails and passing them to the relevant departments for action. Those which remain in customer service are held in our group mail box to ensure they get attended to as quickly as possible.
I head off for lunch about 1pm and by the time I return our colleagues in the US are just arriving, so I check in with them to catch up on any issues that may have arisen for them since I left yesterday.
Next on my schedule is a conference call with a customer who is interested in purchasing one of our library products. I address some of their questions by providing examples of how we have dealt with particular situations in the past. They go away to consider – later, I hear, they get back to our library sales rep to confirm they'd like to take the product, so I'm glad my experience was able to give them the answers they needed.
After the call, I get in touch with one of our subscription agent partners to run through the process with them for activating titles on behalf of their customers. We have a system in place which enables them to submit a file to automatically enable access on our system, and about 10 agents are currently using it.
Then it's back to my inbox to answer some more email queries, including some from our publisher client management group who will contact us from time to time, for example for assistance in setting up access for a new publisher's customers. At about 5pm I sign off and hand over to my US colleagues, who will continue to sort, assign and answer incoming queries until their day finishes (at 10pm UK time) – as a team we will have handled 400 emails during the day!"