A day in the life of GoCardless support

Kicking off the day

It’s 7am and I’m already up bright and early this morning as today is our pre-work morning football match. Luckily I live closer to work than most so I get a little extra of a lie-in than the others. I’d like to think this will translate into a performance comparable to Ronaldinho vs Peter Kay in those John Smith’s ads. Unfortunately my two left feet are likely to say otherwise.

A much sweatier version of myself makes it into the office at around 8.40am. Fortunately the GoCardless office has showers so there’s time to freshen up before work officially begins. A few of our team have been in for a while; with the recent rapid growth of the GoCardless customer base it’s fair to say that the support team are a hard-working bunch!

By 8.55am I have my computer on and my coffee in hand - now it’s time to officially start the day. As always there are several things that I need follow up on before getting down to today’s workload. Whoever invented post-it notes was a genius… my desk is nothing short of a shrine to them!

Customer Happiness

As a team we split our days into segments, rotating between them depending on priorities, volume, any specific cases or projects we’re working on, and simply to avoid the monotony that may otherwise ensue. For the next few hours I’m on calls. Perfect, as I’ve just finished my second coffee and probably couldn’t keep quiet if I tried.

By around 12.45pm I’ve finished my last call of the morning. A lovely retiree needed some help navigating the dashboard to manage payments for her rambling club members – I love taking these calls!

Anyway, now it’s time to put a dent in that seemingly endless cycle of emails.

It’s a busy day for the team - our Slack channel notifies us that we are on high alert due to the amount of calls and emails coming in. Today is office lunch day so we grab something delicious from the huge buffet laid out on the long wooden table by the kitchen. The food is supplied by Cookoo, one of the startups working out of the GoCardless offices. It’s great to sit down and eat with my colleagues but as support is having a busy period I pick up a kebab wrap and salad and decide to eat it at my desk.

At around 2.30pm the phone calls begin to slow for a little while and so I take this opportunity to fit a proper break in. A colleague and I decide it’s time for a quick FIFA rematch on the huge work projector in the office. I still have yet to beat him (despite a shamefully large number of attempts), but I’m feeling confident that my luck is about to change.

15 minutes later… no change. With my tail between my legs, back to emails it is.

Time for a change of pace

I’ve got an accounting partner training session scheduled in with our three newest recruits - two new sales joiners and another in support. With GoCardless being integrated with a number of popular accounting platforms it’s good to know the fundamentals of how these packages operate, especially when in a customer facing role. Having taken on the responsibility of learning these when I joined, I now get to pass on my ‘wisdom’ as and when required.

The further I go through it, the more I’m reminded that the presentation needs a bit of updating. Wunderlist is great for keeping notes on little tasks like this.

It’s 5pm and there’s an hour left of the working day, our email feed is still looking a little on the larger side than we’d like. Our team manager has decided to rally the troops in the best way possible – a competition! Who can respond to the most emails in the next hour; rules being that we must take the next oldest email each time, (and not sacrifice quality for speed, obviously) - Game on!

At 6pm time for our “all-hands” team meeting. This is where the whole team gets together on the office bleachers and our CEO and company VP’s ensure we’re up to speed with what’s going on across the company. Of course, there’s office beers to help our focus.

Once the team meeting is over it’s time to finish off the last couple of emails I’d rather get sent this evening while the issues are fresh in my mind… Ah, one more beer won’t hurt to help see me through.

The emails are finished and I’ve made my notes for tasks first thing tomorrow morning. Now, time to go home and catch up on some Homeland!