What to Expect from Customer Service by Santeri Pakarinen

As my first full-time job I was hired by Rainmaker to do customer service. Posti had outsourced their customer service to this company and as such my duties were centered around tracking parcels. The first couple weeks were a well-paced introduction that mainly served to introduce us to the tools and processes. I saw it as an opportunity to begin forming a foothold into my career, while getting to observe how the day-to-day operations of a firm functioned.

Package tracking can be summarized to be deceptively simple. At the end of the day, there are only a handful of places where a lost parcel might be on its path between A and B. Yet not all parcels are lost and the ones that are have been lost in different ways. However, most calls were simply answering questions that customers have, to which the answers are best learned through repetition. In my opinion the two-week training for the job was sufficient as there is little point in trying to memorize what every specific point in the parcel tracking means. I began recognizing and remembering specific rules and patterns as I experienced them. While asking for help was always encouraged and you could find most of the information in a compiled database of instructions, after a while you run out of questions as you begin to understand the most scenarios

While I wouldn’t say that the job involves much of the skills I’ve gained in the International Business degree, I got to learn a lot about what working in an office environment means to me and gained a deeper understanding of how they function.

Author: Santeri Pakarinen