Time and priority management are key to my role at Calendar Club, in order to meet the varying demands of a seasonal business. My primary role is to manage the product data and images for our 7,000+ products from over 50 suppliers. This involves some product photography and Photoshop editing. Secondary functions of my role include administrative tasks such as processing purchase orders, and creating planograms for stores. Through my own interest, my role has also developed into a part-time ‘visual merchandiser’ role, which is a great creative outlet for me and I take pride in influencing how the stores look and feel. Outside of the retail season, I am involved with designing the layout and sourcing fixtures for all window displays. In the lead-in to retail season, my role involves travelling to both flagship and poor performing stores, to provide help with anything from creating and installing unique window displays to complete rearrangement of store layouts & fixtures.

Spending 3 months as a Trainee Sales Negotiator, I quickly got to grips with the role in the team, booking appointments, conducting viewings and managing my own clients. I soon progressed to Sales Negotiator. The promotion accelerated my personal confidence to build impressive rapport and refine my time management, which in turn, helped to produce more viewings, more sales and to sell additional services. I learned a lot of invaluable personal skills during my time here - the importance of building trust with a client and seeing a job through until completion. I enjoyed a sense of pride in guiding clients through the often confusing home-buying process and working with the sellers to achieve their expectations in the selling process.

Having previously worked at Homebase, my knowledge allowed me to quickly diversify and successfully cover all aspects of the store. My tactile nature proved invaluable when responsible for the customer service desk and I consistently represented the company in a positive light. I particularly enjoyed dealing with kitchen enquiries where I got the chance to shape their designs and impressions, offering an opinion on various contemporary furnishing ideas in order to get the most out of a given space.

During my time at Shell I learnt to multitask more efficiently, dealing with high-volumes of customers at peak times and successfully managing the shop alone during night shifts.

Demonstrating that I was able to learn new skills at a fast pace to deliver a quality product while still maintaining high standards of customer service meant I was promoted to supervisor from a trainee within three months. This lead me to gain and further develop skills such as, multitasking, how to balance resources and money handling.

During my time at Homebase I gained first hand experience of what is needed to give good customer service. The ability to listen, understand and answer queries correctly while constantly being polite. After showing confidence with my product knowledge, till work and stock replenishments, I was given the opportunity to work within the Kitchen and Bathroom department as a sales consultant. This involved learning and relaying technical specifications to customers, producing quality leads for the designers, creating and converting quotes into sales.