Ebrima Mboob
Contact Centre Apprentice
Stockport
What do you do as a Contact Centre Apprentice?
My name is Ebrima Mboob, I’m from Stockport and I work as a Customer Service Advisor. As an apprentice ,on a day-to-day basis. we pick up calls with customers dealing with technical issues with broadband or TV.
Why did you decide to apply for the Contact Centre Apprenticeship?
When I was looking for jobs with Sky, I was looking to just become a Customer Service Advisor – but by then I actually did not know what it meant to be a Customer Service Advisor. So I was like, ‘Okay, best role I can see is the apprenticeship.’, which means that I can be taught within that role. I can actually just grow within within the industry and actually become better at my job, rather than just jumping into the deep end and not knowing exactly what to do and what not to do.
What skills will you develop on the Contact Centre Apprenticeship?
This role at the moment is going to help me boost my confidence, my product knowledge and my customer service experience as well, which I can then use in different roles.
What do you love about your job?
Helping people; that’s what I love about my job. I love tech and I love problem solving, so being able to just have different issues or situations that people are having with their broadband or with their TV. It’s helping people – 100 percent.
What support have you received on the Contact Centre Apprenticeship?
Absolutely there’s a lot of support from my manager at the moment. Every now and then he’ll message me; ‘Are you okay?’ or ‘How is it going?’. Also, we’ve got a WhatsApp group chat where we all have different conversations on some of the problems we might be having.
We’re all made to feel included. We’ve got that group chat where we all can talk to each other whenever we can and we have different one-to-one sessions as well with the SRM’s.
They would tell us; ‘Okay. This is what you’re doing, this is where you are and this way you need to be.’ It basically just gives us that little push. That’s something that if we’re not doing something right ,they would tell us; ‘Okay, this what you’re doing and this is how you need to do it better.’ and ‘This is what you’re doing well.’ as well. We had a lot of support and we’re still getting a lot of support there.
Do you feel connected with your colleagues?
Because of the current situation with COVID, we did genuinely have that connection because we’re all doing the training online and virtually. We did have that moment where we were talking to each other and we were broken off into different groups during the training.
What challenges have you encountered during the Contact Centre Apprenticeship?
The biggest challenge is probably the fact that, again I’m just going to base on the current situation, it’s not being able to see people and socialise. And maybe it’s overcoming that nervousness; not knowing what’s going to be on the other side of that call.
When customers call, you don’t even know what the problem is going to be and it could range from something that you’ve already done. It could be something you’ve already learned before to something completely new and you’re just like ‘I don’t know what to do or where to go from here.’ It’s just having that connection with your customer and being able to find out as much information as you can to be able to help them.
How did you overcome those challenges?
So when those difficult calls come through we’ve had sessions where we’ve discussed how to deal with difficult calls with customers – but if we can’t actually physically deal with it we can actually go back to our role models or we can go back to our manager and say ‘This is a problem and this is where this is what I’ve done so far – do you have any advice?’ and they’ll be able to give you advice as if they’ve done with that like dealt with that situation before anyway.
Where do you see your career developing at Sky?
Where do I see my career developing in Sky? Well right now I’m a Customer Advisor. I hopefully want to just progress into like an engineer because I do like fixing stuff, I do like problem solving and I do like tech – so I want to get into like engineering and be able to progress into that.
Would you recommend the Contact Centre Apprenticeship?
I absolutely would recommend it to get friends. I’ve already have to be honest! I’ve already started recommending it to friends already anyway. So yeah, I would definitely recommend Contact Centre Apprenticeship.
