From the back office to assisting residents on-site, FirstPort employees are dedicated to delivering the highest standards of customer support.
FirstPort is sharing stories from staff who are using their customer support background to offer the best level of service as they progress in their career.
Harry Thompson
Harry joined FirstPort in 2016 in a customer service role. He started by taking customer calls and assisting with queries, and later progressed into a social media support role where he would respond to customer feedback and liaise with the relevant teams to ensure questions were answered and issues were resolved.
Now he’s a property manager in Essex and he’s using the essential customer support skills gained in his previous roles to deliver first-class face-to-face service across his developments.
“I decided after about two-and-a-half years that I wanted to broaden my horizons and broaden the knowledge that I’d already developed within the social media role and try to put it into practice,” explained Harry.
He now takes an active role in overseeing the management of various developments, adding: “It’s such a different role to anything that I’ve ever done before, but one of the things that it has been easier for me is the fact that my team around me has been very supportive, knowing that my knowledge of being an actual Property Manager is very limited, but I have knowledge from other areas of the business. I will continue to learn and grow, so having that support from the team has been fantastic.”
Aaron Dhanoa
Within a week of leaving college, Aaron Dhanoa secured his first job as a customer service advisor at FirstPort. Three years on and he’s the Property Manager for nine developments in south London.
Aaron, who admits he “never thought of property management as a career path until coming across FirstPort,” has since become a passionate advocate of property services.
After leaving college in 2019, Aaron was quickly introduced to FirstPort and began a job in the customer services department. He says the role gave him many transferable skills, adding: “There’s so much you learn, and seeing the resolution and the customer happy is obviously the best thing.”
It wasn’t long before Aaron took on a senior customer service role, which focused on dealing with urgent and specialist responses to customer enquiries. It was here that he gained the crucial experience needed to become a Property Manager.
Aaron said: “We would deal with all of the major issues such as leaks, any gates or lifts that are out of action, and we will have to take ownership of the problems and deal with them working with the Property Managers. I think that’s where I got my insight as to what a Property Manager does, and I learnt lots about the job role.
“I was reporting to about seven Property Managers and that was a lot of sites and every day there will be another challenge coming through. But it allowed me to become who I am to enter my current role.”
Sophie McEvoy
Service Excellence Manager Sophie McEvoy has seen rapid career progression since starting at FirstPort. She has excelled in providing a quality customer experience and through her hard work and dedication, she has gone from a support coordinator to Service Excellence Manager in just three years. Her current role offers support to on-site colleagues through various customer support queries.
Sophie said: “My current focus is on complaints. Customers, quite rightly, have high expectations of the service they expect to receive, and our new IT systems have made us much more efficient.
“We now have much better visibility of customer enquiries and so can deal with them much more quickly and effectively. We can identify any trends, interpret the root cause, and then put in place the necessary improvements.”
Summary
Ultimately, customer service is a crucial function for any business. That’s why we are proud that many of our colleagues have stayed with us and developed their careers in roles that help customers every day.
