Length at current job: 3 months.
Tell me a little about your position and what you do on a day-to-day basis. Who are your customers and your co-workers? Do you work in a team environment or independently?
The purpose of my role is to monitor and report on complaint handling performance within Housing & Landlord Services (H&LS), to offer guidance, training and insight, to remind officers about impending target dates and chase up overdue responses. I am also responsible for ensuring we comply with legislation and for completing and publishing our annual self-assessment.
My customers are the officers who handle complaints within H&LS – I try to make myself available to offer advice or help them with technical issues whenever necessary. They are often juggling heavy workloads and could probably do without my nudging/nagging, but fortunately most of them understand that I’m trying to help them and ultimately trying to improve the resident experience.
I am part of the Business Innovation team, where there are two other Senior Business Information Analysts, but I do work largely independently on a day-to-day basis. The people who I would mostly consider my co-workers are actually the Customer Relations Team, as they are the people who I regularly speak to for advice relating to complaints and enquiries, to request changes to cases and collaborate with about training and process improvements.
What keeps you motivated to go to work each day? What is your proudest accomplishment?
The desire to actually bring about tangible change, both for the residents who submit complaints, but also for our officers who are handling complaints. Seeing the figures slowly improve as the months go by is really motivating.
I like that I have the freedom to make the role what I want it to be. I am not micro-managed at all and am trusted to use my experience and instincts to dig out the insightful information, to look for trends and focus on what I feel is most important in the here and now. I also love the fact that it’s allowed me to start building relationships with people across all of the operational services in Housing.
My proudest accomplishment is mastering the reporting side of the iCasework system with no training, such that I am able to produce detailed and insightful reports for the various Housing and Landlord service areas.
Are there any challenges in your job? If so, how do you handle them?
The biggest challenge to date has been the lack of understanding of using the iCasework system, for both myself and the officers handling complaints. I’ve tackled that by screen-sharing and muddling through the issues with officers, learning as I go and helping others to learn too. I’m in the process of creating a suite of training products for H&LS, so going forward this challenge should be greatly reduced.
How have your past experiences prepared you for this job? How have you evolved in your current role and where do you hope to go next?
I’ve spent over 30 years working in law, starting as a typist in Bristol County Court back in 1988 and becoming a legal business analyst in 2008. I’ve also dabbled in art (acrylics historically but now watercolours) and ran a reasonably successful YouTube channel for a few years. My experience working with complex formulae and pivot tables in Excel, gained over the years, have helped.
What’s probably been most helpful is something pretty simple that we can all relate to, which is that I am a customer – we all are. I try to always have the perspective of: if I was this resident, what would I want from the Council? How would I want to be treated and communicated with? What would be likely to make me more upset when I’ve already complained?
I am at the point in my career where I’m no longer striving for progression – I just want to finish most days feeling like I made a difference. Job satisfaction has become far more important to me than how much I earn or what my job title is.
What advice would you give someone who is seeking the same line of work?
My advice for someone who wanted to get into performance analysis would be to make sure that you actually truly care about getting to the root cause of things – providing really insightful analysis requires a determination to dig through data (quantitative and qualitative) in a variety of ways… be open minded, be prepared to test each and every hypothesis and be prepared to present data in various different ways.
If you’re looking to get into the world of complaints or customer service, the ability to look at things from the perspective of the residents is what I find most important in my role
Where do you hope to go with this job, or in your career in general?
"I am at the point in my career where I'm no longer striving for progression, I just want to finish most days feeling like I made a difference. Job satisfaction has become far more important to me than how much I earn or what my job title is".