Fulcrum

As part of National Customer Service Week, we’re shining a light on the contribution our colleagues make to the relationships we have with our customers and clients.

A bit of background:

I recently rejoined Fulcrum in the summer after a year away from the Group working in the aerospace sector. I’d originally been with Fulcrum for 20 years, developing my career through a range of customer-centric roles where I’d built up some fantastic relationships with customers. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to return to Fulcrum to work with those customers again and build new relationships as we grow our presence across multiple markets and UK regions.

What’s a typical day for you?

While no day is the same, the one constant is supporting our customers, primarily our high-volume client base. These clients use our multi-design, project management and installation capabilities on behalf of their own client bases.

As a result, there are always several projects happening at the same time, which requires a consistent conduit between Fulcrum, our customers and their clients, and that’s what I do, every day.

Throughout any given day I meet with customers, either face to face or via video call. I really enjoy getting out and meeting with customers, it’s how I developed my career by building strong relationships and I’d like to be out more having in-person contact.

Zoom and Teams are great and can improve productivity, and reduce my carbon footprint by not having to travel, and allow me to have a good mix of ‘touch base’ calls and face to face review meetings.

These meetings can be quite broad ranging, but essentially, they’re to ensure the effective delivery of projects through relationship-driven operations. This enables us to ensure we can meet, and sometimes exceed, their expectations and maintain the levels of customer excellence we strive for.

These partnerships are a core element of our business and bring mutual benefits to both parties, both in terms of the successful delivery of current projects as well as future opportunities.

In this role I am the voice of Fulcrum for our high-volume customers, providing that link between our teams on the ground and the customers who will have multiple live projects for different clients happening concurrently.

Therefore, maintaining excellent lines of communication, not only between myself and the customers, but also throughout Fulcrum, is a vital part of our commitment to customer excellence.

I’m based in our head office in Sheffield, and if not on the road meeting customers, I’ll be taking part in weekly internal meetings for updates on performance and customer expectations, which is very much part of ensuring clear channels of communication between us and our customers.

We have a great team at Fulcrum and I am really happy to back in the business, working closely with them. It’s a really integrated business, with each department working hand-in-hand to meet customer expectations, which is really great to be part of.

Of course, there can be project issues, which is part of any large-scale construction-related scheme, but that’s also where the collaborative approach we take, both externally with customers and across teams in the business, proves to be so effective.

What’s the most satisfying part of the job?

Without doubt it’s building relationships with customers that helps deliver projects that are on time, on budget and meet expectations. When you are dealing with strategic accounts with volume projects there is always the prospect for issues to arise. However, having someone like myself at the end of the phone who can respond quickly and help our team put into action a solution to overcome any challenges is extremely satisfying.