LISA GILLESPIE Head of Learning and Development Make UK
Lisa has been in the HR industry for 25 years in a number of roles. She holds qualifications in law, a post-graduate diploma in HRM, philosophy, psychology and creative writing. In addition she qualified as a practitioner in PRINCE 2 and neurolinguistic programming.
HR & RECRUITMENT
www.MakeUK.org |
lgillespie@makeuk.org
Gearbox blues
I HAVE spent more than is left on my mortgage restoring my Volkswagen campervan over the last couple of years; the only thing that wasn’t touched was the engine.
I should caveat this by saying that wasn’t the plan at the start but I won’t bore you with the torrid tale. My plan was to get a Subaru engine in eventually when I had recovered from the financial shock but the campervan had other ideas when I was travelling back from Weymouth a couple of weeks ago and I broke the gearbox.
I spent 24 hours at the side of motorways or in the services at the mercy of the most disorganised breakdown recovery service I have ever experienced. I won’t name and shame but in those long hours by the roadside I had a lot of time to ponder the gap between brand identity and customer experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I spoke to a lot of very professional and helpful people who had been well trained on customer service but the problem was that they were utterly ineffective because of enormous technical, process and resourcing issues
Eventually I discovered that by pressing the
wrong numbers on the automatic call-handling system and pretending I had just been in a collision that I could get through on the telephone within 10 minutes.
which meant that a seamless service simply could not be provided.
To begin with I just could not get through on the telephone. Every time I tried it took over 30 minutes to get through. I would not have minded so much but three drivers did not turn up because one had been assigned my ticket, accepted it then was sent home because he had not had a break. Another was passed the ticket but he was 90 minutes away and would have missed the connection which was to collect me in Staffordshire.
Lisa's Volkswagen campervan
I received a call from a chap who told me it was good that I couldn’t select any gears which occasioned me asking him what the point of the call was, only to be told he was a technical expert who would assign an appropriate driver. He sent a chap in an ordinary van who declared my gearbox to be deceased, which of course (having rebuilt the odd gearbox in my youth) I had
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