My name is Grant. I work in Customer Services for Oxford City Council. I started working with the Council in June 2019 after leaving a customer service background with Sainsbury’s and Hollywood Bowl. In my previous roles within customer service, I worked mainly face to face, however, with my current role, I am mainly phone based. This did take a little while to adapt but I am a fairly flexible person, so after not too long I settled in.
A little while later, in February I believe, was when I first met Wendy from Tenant Involvement. Before the times of working from home, Wendy came and sat next to me for the morning just watching how we do our work in Customer Services. We agreed that I would do the same and go and shadow Wendy’s work in Tenant Involvement.
Before we was able to arrange a date for this, the majority of the Council began working from home, so this made it impossible for us to shadow in the same way. Despite this we did have a couple of meeting just chatting about what she does and how she would like the help of Customer Services. Unfortunately, just as we got going with some meetings, I was off for a month recovering from a knee operation.
Since I have been back from my operation, myself have been working closer together virtually and it has been very eye opening for me to see exactly what Wendy gets up to. I have really enjoyed working alongside Tenant Involvement as well as the Great Estates team recently in helping to decide where the council will regenerate in the city for the upcoming financial year.
This has been really insightful for me to see how Wendy is involved in this process, contacting our own tenants and residents around the city to find out where they would like the regeneration and what else they would like their council to do. This is good for me as I speak to so many people every single day.
Now that I am aware of how the Tenant Involvement team works and what they need from us in customer services, I am able to listen out to any customers that I speak to that may be willing to be an ambassador for their area and help us out with these decisions and other decisions in the future.
Good to read of your interest in what happens in Tenant Involvement. I have been involved with this area for some time and it has always proved enlightening when we have been given insights into what happens in other departments of the City Council. I expect that many areas will have different ways of working when this pandemic has been brought under control and I hope that the Ambassadors will be kept 'in the picture' as to how practices have been changed. I hope you continue to enjoy your role and hopefully progress your career further.