Career journeys are often complex, and most people actually change their job role multiple times throughout their career until they find something they really love. Changing roles within a company allows you to build on what you’ve already accomplished, as you’ve already built up a network of colleagues and a positive reputation.
Helen has been with CT for 4 years and her career journey has expanded across several areas of the business.
To give you more of an insight into life at CT, what it’s like working as a Sales Support Administrator, and her career journey so far, we’ve asked Helen to answer a few questions regarding her job role.
Can you describe your job role currently at CT?
I currently work as a Sales Support Administrator. The main role of this job is to support the Account Management team with everyday queries such as raising quotations for customers, liaising with suppliers and distributors for stock, and collaborating with our Technical Pre-sales team for project work. Other parts of the role include answering inbound calls for the Sales team and managing tickets from our Post Sale queue for quality control and clarity.
What does your average day look like?
We say it a lot – but no two days are the same! The majority of the job is administration work, this involves responding to emails (both internal from a variety of departments and external from customers), answering inbound calls to the Sales department, and ensuring tickets logged have correct and accurate information on for our Implementation team to resolve.
Depending on demand from the Account Management team, we also get involved with ordering connectivity, dealing with billing and contract queries, searching for stock and obtaining the best price for our customers.
What skills are required for this job role?
I think there are two very important parts to this role; having very high attention to detail, and great customer service skills.
High attention to detail helps with several areas of this role, but in particular it helps with ticket logging in terms of ensuring information is accurate within the ticket. This can be including the right level of information (such as adding or removing technical jargon depending on the audience) and ensuring there is a high level of quality at the beginning of the customer journey to ensure all departments are aware as to the expected outcome.
Having great customer service skills is a large umbrella, but for me I think being able to communicate the right information to the right audience is key, as well as being adaptable to any situation, and being organised to ensure the priority of work is correct.
How would you describe your career journey at CT?
I originally applied to CT to be a Field Engineer, unfortunately at that time my experience was mostly of internal IT and not much field experience. I really liked the atmosphere, and even the interview process felt easy – so although I was unfortunate in obtaining the field engineer position, CT saw the potential in me and offered me the role of Technical Co-ordinator with the goal of transitioning into a Field Engineer.
After a year and a half, lots of hard work, several exams being undertaken and passed, and shadowing opportunities with engineers, I was able to move away from co-ordinating and become a full-time Field Engineer. I enjoyed the variety of the role, spending a lot of time with our regular customers on scheduled site visits, weekends working away for out-of-hours and office moves, and even exposure to project work such as Office 365 migrations.
Due to personal circumstances, I did need to cut my hours and unfortunately this wasn’t possible with the demands of being an engineer. However, CT were able to offer me a part-time role but in Sales, as a supporting role. This was a career change for me – but I haven’t looked back since! CT have supported me every step of the way in my new role, and I really feel I have expanded my current skill set massively, I also think the technical experience gained as an engineer has been invaluable to the Sales team.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job role?
Knowing at the end of the day there is always support available; whether this is further assistance on a task that has been allocated from Senior Management, sitting down and having an open discussion with an Account Manager to further understand a requirement, and ensuring that all the sales decisions are technically lead.
What have you learnt during your time at CT?
I think the hands-on experience being out in the field, working with our customers face-to-face, and resolving ad-hoc issues really has developed my communication and technical skills. I have also improved my self-confidence, and gained empathy for the common issues that can arise between technical and non-technical teams.
Why should people join Team CT and what would be your advice to them?
Any job at CT will develop you as a person and develop your skill set, and with hard work and determination, you can obtain the building blocks for a solid foundation, in a fun environment, working with likeminded people every day.
At CT, we pride ourselves on supporting our staff in finding the path that’s right for them. If you are interested in IT or have an transferable skills that you can bring to our team, please check out our vacancies page.
