During my time as a telephony consultant for Scottish Widows, I was able to to develop key problem solving skills within my day to day role to help eliminate issues at source. As a result of this, my progression naturally lead me to the Incident Management Team that work directly with the Automatic Enrolment Support Team on a daily basis.I work alongside 2 other colleagues and together we manage all of the system issues that are raised by AssistMe users through the Automatic Enrolment Support Team. I will triage all tickets raised with us to ensure that any known fixes are communicated to the customer, and only true incidents are escalated to our third party technical support team at SBC Systems.I work closely with SBC Systems ensuring that updates on raised issues are provided to the customer, and we are able to plot a route to live across 2 weekly deployment windows. This involves participation on weekly calls, as well as a full incident prioritisation structure which has been collectively developed since my arrival to the team.Communication skills are key within this role as we are actively managing a relationship between a third party, Scottish Widows and the customer. We need to ensure that the priority incidents are being dealt with correctly and to a timely manner, whilst also managing expectations across all areas. We ensure that our Oracle based business platform, CRM, is fully updated with any updates to an incident. This is used by both the Automatic Enrolment Support Team and the Incident Management Team, so it is crucial that the information held on this platform is up to date and factual so that the customer message remains consistent and correct.I have also had involvement within a Continuous Improvement Forum during my time at Scottish Widows where me and a colleague from the Automatic Enrolment Support Team liaise with our teams and collate suggestions on how to improve our day to day processes.

Following the expiry of the Firstsource/Scottish Widows partnership within the automatic enrolment support team, I was successful in securing a permanent position within Scottish Widows as a telephony consultant and colleague mentor.Building on the skills that I had developed during my initial 9 month period in Edinburgh, I was also able to alongside my colleagues as a mentor, directly assisting with their personal development.As I had been with the Automatic Enrolment Support Team since its creation back in December 2013, I was an SME within my role and fielded queries from both new and existing colleagues for both the telephony and mailbox queries. This also allowed me to help train new colleagues who joined the team both in side by side training, as well as creating process documentation for them to read through.I also helped embed a quality structure to the team, ensuring that both the telephony and mailbox support channels were meeting DPA requirements, as well as providing a good customer service. This involved me developing the following...- Call & Email Standard Guilde: This detailed each individual quality category and what was expected from everybody to pass in each area covered.- Quality marking sheet: This was an excel based project that I worked on myself to ensure that we were marking calls in a consistent and efficient manner. The form would allow for the scoring to be automatically calculated based on if an individual received either a minor or a major process fail. It also had commentary sections so that it could be printed off and discussed face to face with colleagues.- Management Tool: This was another excel project I developed myself which allowed the managers within the Automatic Enrolment Support Team to keep a track of the team's quality scoring metrics, and also see common fail areas across all marked calls and emails.All 3 of the above tools have been continuously updated and are still used to this day.

I was successful in applying for an opportunity that had arisen to work in partnership with Scottish Widows in Edinburgh for 3 months alongside 13 other colleagues selected from within Firstsource.Together we formed the Automatic Enrolment Support Team alongside a selection of Scottish Widows employees. This team was set up to directly support Scottish Widows customers with their automatic enrolment journey through an online program called AssistMe.After the 3 month secondment period had ended, Scottish Widows made the decision to extend the Firstsource contract for an additional 4 months and within July 2014, a final 3 month contract extension was agreed which saw the duration of the contract last until October 2014.During this time, I was introduced to the world of pensions and picked up key knowledge around legislation set by The Pensions Regulator including...- Staging dates and how they impact an employer- Payment reference periods- Contribution payment deadlines- Assessment criteria for auto enrolment- Staging, eligibility and worker postponement- Minimum contribution percentages for both employer and employee- Re-enrolment of a workforce- Salary Sacrifice and how this processed on a data file- Opting out of a pension- Being a contractual joiner within a schemeAs this was a more technically driven role than my previous position in Middlesbrough, I was able to develop my analytical skills by identifying issues being raised to us directly by customers and business development managers. Our team acted as a front line to try and resolve issues presented to us on phone calls and through dedicated support mailboxes so we needed to ensure that we were not raising false issues to our Incident Management TeamAt the end of the contract duration, we were then offered the chance to apply for a full time role with Scottish Widows to continue our work within the Automatic Enrolment Support Team.