SK Chase – the next phase
As I sit here writing this blog on the 30th of December, just after our busiest period of the year, I have been able to reflect on the past year at SK Chase, and in particular the last 3-6 months. I wanted to take some space to acknowledge all that we have been through as a team over this period of time.
As you will be aware from reading the blog and keeping up to date with the website, SK Chase has been through a number of changes during this time.
New gift voucher sites
In June, as part of our system rebuild project, we introduced our new gift voucher ‘front end’ and checkout and began updating our clients’ gift voucher sites. The new design and features helped make the gift voucher sites more intuitive, streamlined and easy to use for our clients and their customers. We began this project some time ago and it felt great to finally have the sites up and running and to be moving clients onto the new design gradually.
It is important to acknowledge that during our busiest period the new sites were tested to their maximum capacity and this has thrown up issues which we are looking into resolving as priorities. Although extremely uncomfortable to be having these issues during our busiest period of time, the sheer volume of traffic experienced also helped us uncover these.
New technology partner
In November we started working with our new technology partner, Perfect Image. Perfect Image are now in the process of reviewing our system and working on the bugs which were unearthed over the Christmas period. We’re really energised working with Perfect Image and look forward to the New Year and what this can bring for SK Chase and our clients.
Bringing customer service back in house
We previously outsourced our customer service, working with a specialist company who helped with day to day gift voucher enquiries that our clients’ and their buyers may have had. Following a review of our service and listening to feedback from our clients, we made the decision to bring our customer service back ‘in house’ over the festive period and to support this we also recruited two ‘Service Delivery Administrators’ and a new ‘Service Manager’.
New team members
As I touched on above, SK Chase has been through one of its busiest recruitment periods recently. Since September 2013 we have recruited 6 new staff members. As a small team recruiting this number of new team members pretty much doubled our existing team member count. Part of our recruitment drive was brought about by us choosing to focus on providing an even better service to our clients, whilst the decision to bring service back in house over Christmas also created a need for more capacity within the business. With our culture being so important to us it was crucial that we recruited team members who were not only a commercial match but also a cultural match.
Team spirit
I cannot put in to words how proud I am about the way in which our team performed over Christmas. We all pulled together during this time, even though we were all experiencing “new” things and were new to each other as a team. If I could bottle that team spirit I would, I’m sure it would be a best seller :-)!
So as we move in to 2014, I wanted to acknowledge the journey we have been on and the fact that it hasn’t all been plain sailing throughout; we have taken the good times with the bad, however we made it this far as a team…… now let’s get our teeth stuck in to 2014!