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Last week at the Contact Centre Network Northern Ireland awards in Belfast we picked up the People Engagement prize.

We came out as winners in a category with many of the UK’s leading contact centres including BT, Ulster Bank, Power NI and Capita.

The award was presented to Sensée because of our work, across many parts of our business, to put people at our heart:

• Pay — providing the Real Living Wage
• Recruitment — starting by engaging with people who are considering a career with us
• Training — making everyone feel at home from day one
• Operational Management — engaging our colleagues every hour they are working
• Community — engagement outside of work
• Initiatives — such as our initiative to support mental health week

The judges also recognised the impact our people engagement strategy has had on our business — reducing sickness as well as improving retention and performance.

Many thanks to everyone throughout Sensée who has made winning this award possible.

Over the last 6 month we’ve been working in Northern Ireland to bring our flexible homeworking to towns and glens.

If you’d like to find out more about how our homeworking will fit around your life, and how to apply, drop in to see us at one of these locations:

Ballymena Jobs & Benefits Office — 10th October
2 Parkway, Ballymena, BT43 5ET
2pm until 4pm

Strabane Jobs & Benefits Office — 15th October
18 Urney Rd, Strabane BT82 9DA
10am until 12pm

Mid Ulster Job Fair, Cookstown Leisure Centre— 20th November
78 Fountain Road, Cookstown, BT80 8QF
11:30 am until 6 pm

Foyle Jobs & Benefits Office — 26th Nov
Crown Buildings, Asylum Rd, Londonderry BT48 7EA
10am until 12pm

Come along for a chat, we’d love to see you there. If you can’t make it, but would still like to find out more, you can get more information and apply online or drop Annamarie a line: 028 867 63889, nirecruitment@sensee.co.uk.

We’re pleased to say that, once again, we’ve been selected as finalists for major contact centre awards.

The Contact Centre Network Awards recognise the outstanding achievements of service organisations and individuals in Northern Ireland, where many of our team are based.

Our selection as a finalist in the People Engagement Award category recognises the range of work we do to engage and support our remote teams.

The UK Contact Centre Forum Awards acknowledge best practice amongst the UK’s 6000+ contact centres — rewarding innovation, team-working, employee engagement, the delivery of superb Customer Experience and more.

Our unique homeworking operation has made the finals in three categories:
• Outsourcing partnership of the year — for our work with DPD
• Employee engagement strategy of the year
• Home agent operation of the year

The Gala Awards Ceremony for CCN takes place on 17th October at the Crowne Plaza Belfast. Awards for the UKCCF will be presented on October 25th at MK Dons Football Club.

 

 

We regularly run one day best practice and benchmarking homeworking workshopsto support UK businesses that want to benefit from homeworking for voice as well as digital customer service.

The workshops are designed to help optimise existing homeworking operations or successfully implement new ones. Led by our senior homeworking experts, they cover:

• How to benchmark a current approach and future homeworking plans
• Best practices for everything from recruitment to IT and scheduling
• The many benefits that contact centre homeworking has brought for businesses in all industries

We’re passionate about homeworking and — as specialists working with companies in all sectors from financial services to utilities and retail for over 15 years — have a lot of experience to share.

The workshops are open to both public as well as private sector organisations, and we’ve had great feedback from leading UK contact centres including Nationwide, Sky, M&S, HMRC and Budget Insurance. 

If you’d like to come along to the next event, take a look at the workshops page where you’ll find out more about the date, location and what’s covered.

We think that providing opportunities for engagement, communities and socialisation is part and parcel of creating great work from home jobs. And, that working from home isn’t a solitary experience unless you want it to be — some of our people do choose it for the peace and quiet!

At Sensée we have a community and socialisation programme that connects everyone through positive engagement. It’s supported by our technology platform, that joins our teams together by allowing communication as well as interaction, and is actively managed throughout the year.

So far this year just some of the successful projects in the programme include:

Mental health week

For this we focused on providing information, throughout the week, on where support can be found as well as the impact of mental health issues. We also covered how we’ve created practical ways to help our community with improving life-work balance, reducing stress and managing anxiety.

National Carers week

8% of our team are carers and this project looked at how we could support them with information and help from various institutions. We also created a Sensée Carer Support Community. This provides a support network for carers and a voice for how we can best cater for their specific needs.

ex-Military and Military Spouses, Maternity Leavers and Disability groups

These groups have also been created to give support and understanding for people within our homeworking community that may also have special requirements.

All the effort, from community leaders and moderators to team leaders and managers, put into the projects, is making home a better place to work.

Overall the positive impact of the programme is reflected in the fact that our people are happy to stay with us for much longer than the industry average.

Better engagement, and the long length of time that people stay, is also something that means the standard of care our clients’ customers receive is high (we consistently provide industry-high standards). Our continued engagement, community and socialisation work will only add to this in future.

This month saw our homeworking outsource services and platform come on-line for SSE. They’re part of the SSE Group, one of the UK’s largest and fastest growing energy companies.

With over 20,000 team members, at more than 150 locations, they’re a significant employer throughout the UK. Their diverse range of operations provides opportunities for people with a variety of skills and those looking for an exciting career change.

SSE is also dedicated to local communities and through their sponsorship programmes and volunteering projects, their aiming to put something back into the areas where they work.

Our outsource service advisor teams, and scalable cloud technology platform, has helped SSE bring homeworking on the grid in double quick time.

Currently, we have over 100 advisors providing general enquiry services for the major utility.

The project is also helping to support SSE’s long-term objective to have their own people working from home using the Sensée technology platform.

This month we’re delighted to say hello to well-known financial services brand Legal and General.

Legal and General are a top 20 global asset manager and the UK’s largest provider of individual life assurance products.

Founded in 1836, they’ve grown into one of Europe’s largest insurance and asset management groups, with over £1 trillion in assets.

They aim to be economically and socially useful — improving the lives of their customers, building a better society for the long term and creating value for shareholders.

Their business is divided into six segments, which are focussed on delivering protection, retirement, solutions, savings and investment management for our customers.

Right now, we’re providing outsource customer service help for several different lines of business. And, as homeworking is now part of their customer service strategy, they’re looking to expand its use across more parts of their organisation over the coming years.

We’re looking forward to creating more work from home jobs to meet their needs soon.

Over the last few months we’ve been working closely with Hastings Direct, helping them to set up a new outsource customer services homeworking operation.

They’re one of the UK’s fastest growing general insurance providers — offering a range of competitive and straightforward products and services including car, bike, van as well as home insurance. They also provide additional insurance services such as breakdown cover and family legal protection.

Hastings has a proud 20-year history. Since selling their first policy in 1997, they’ve been committed to their colleagues, customers, company as well as communities. They also regularly support charity and educational causes in their local communities of Bexhill-on-Sea and Leicester.

A major UK financial services provider, they have over 2.7million live customer policies and 3,300 colleagues.

Our Hastings Direct homeworking team of 120 service and sales advisors cover all operational hours. This includes the challenging times of early mornings, evenings and weekends as well as volatile peaks during the day.

We’re thrilled to be helping them tackle these key customer service challenges. And, supporting their multi-award business that has achieved Defaqto 5-star ratings for home and car insurance over the last 4 years.

We’re not allowed to say who yet, but this month we started working for another financial services client. This time it’s one of the fastest growing, best known and most forward-thinking names in consumer insurance.

Ten years ago I was told that homeworking wouldn’t work for the money men. “It’s too risky, against the regulations and never going to work with our IT” — just some of the reasons I heard time and again.

Never one to be swayed by opinion alone, I thought we could show homeworking would work well for this the most tightly regulated and cost competitive sector. If it worked for financial services, any other sector would also be a snap.

Fast forward to 2018 — our FCA approval, ISO accreditation and secure technology platform means we’ve just started working with our 4th financial services client. All were convinced by the service, cost and corporate social responsibility benefits of homeworking, and saw no problems with using it.

In the end, the barriers we faced were nothing to do with people, technologies or process — it was just plain old resistance to change.

With so many benefits for people and organisations, homeworking is now fast becoming the norm. I’m looking forward to welcoming the next four financial services clients very soon.

The paint has dried, the grass has been laid (in the meeting room), and the kettle’s been unpacked. We’re now settled in the Clockwork Building in Ravenscourt Park — southwest London.

The refurbished building — designed by architect Richard Sieffert and built on the site of the famous International Time Recording company — has been transformed and provides us with communal gardens, break-out areas as well as a terrace on the roof with views across London!

Our new home gives the central team more space, and room to expand, as we continue to deliver exceptional service for our existing clients, develop our services, find new customers and grow as a business.

If you’re passing, just let us know if you want to drop in for a cup of tea on the meeting room lawn.