Katie Lamb

Service Administrator

A day in the life of a service administrator 

An ability to juggle lots of tasks at the same time, coupled with an unfaltering positivity and 'can-do' attitude are qualities that define our service administrator Katie Lamb. Based in our Pulborough office, Katie is on the end of the phone assisting our clients and engineering teams no matter what the issue.

Having worked at Sowga since September 2016, Katie now oversees client compliance and servicing scheduling for all customers from London to the West Country. Integral to the everyday running of our operations, we spoke to Katie about her role within the organisation and asked what a typical day involves:

Fortunately, I only live around 20 minutes away from work, in Horsham, so my drive into the office starts at 7.20am and allows enough time for a coffee before I begin on the helpdesk at 8am. It's a lovely journey through the beautiful West Sussex countryside and makes me grateful to live and work in such a nice part of the country.

My day begins by logging onto the system to see if any call outs have happened overnight. These calls are monitored remotely during out of office hours so that there's always someone available to help our clients whatever the time of day or night. My job is to catch up with the engineers to make sure everything has been dealt with and provide additional support where needed. I then log the details onto our system.

The morning is spent managing the engineering team, and this is one of the most important aspects of my role. Each engineer has their work scheduled for the week ahead and every job goes through me. It's a big responsibility, but I enjoy the challenge of working out who to send where. Our customers' compliance relies on ensuring that regular servicing and maintenance of equipment is kept up to date and never allowed to slip. I'm at the forefront of meeting these compliance requirements, sending reminders to property managers and owners when these checks need to happen.

We also organise Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM) programmes for a number of buildings so today I'm booking service visits for CCTV systems and fire alarms.

At 11am I'm busy speaking to clients, helping to get the right Sowga expert on the right job. By being here on the end of the phone, I've built a sense of trust with our clients. A service administrator needs to be able to effectively plan, juggle different tasks and keep an eye on the ball, and because of this no two weeks are ever the same.

Lunch is a chance to take a break from the helpdesk. By 2pm I'm back monitoring emails and dealing with anything that's come into my inbox. This afternoon, I'm looking forward to the next week of scheduling which is putting my problem-solving skills to the test as it's holiday time and some engineers are away. The hot weather has also kept me busy as we've had a few calls about air conditioning systems so it's all hands on deck.

My day finishes at 5pm. As I drive home it's nice to know I've made sure everyone is where they're supposed to be. I get a great sense of satisfaction from phoning a client to say 'there's nothing to worry about, the job is done'. Clients also appreciate the consistency of knowing I'm there on the end of the phone. It really is a lovely place to work.