Customer service Nationwide!

My name is Elias Lounaskorpi, I am 23 years old, and I have been working in phone customer service in Lassila & Tikanoja Property Maintenance LLC for the last 6 months and it has been an interesting experience to say the least. I started to work there as a summer employee where I worked Monday to Friday 8-16 which made sure that I had summer weekends free! The Customer service is nationwide and 24/7 but luckily, I didn’t do any night or evening shift during the summer.

The work itself was basically problem solving and mapping out issues for the customers. Sometimes they needed to know about where to pick up the keys to their new apartment, sometimes they needed a parking space or sauna shift, sometimes they had some issues with their apartments such as leaky tap in the kitchen or even the PSAP emergency hotline calling us that there is a fire alarm in one of the properties that is under our maintenance, which means that no-one call is the same. The most fascinating thing was that you realize that people are so different even in such a small country, for example the people in the capital area seem to be very busy and have a limited time to do things whereas people from the “countryside” and Lapland don’t seem to be in any hurry and like to crack jokes all the time. I usually try to have a little bit of fun with the customers but also find the right customers and times when to crack a joke.

That’s what I enjoy about the job, it is not all the same thing every day and you get to use your head! For example, I had a lady call me that she has a leaking pipe and it needed immediate attention, I started to ask her some basic questions to get more info on the situation and the issue was that her bidet was leaking in the bathroom, but they only leak when you use the tap which doesn’t make it an emergency since it is not leaking all the time.

My favorite thing is my co-workers. They are super fun, understanding and just overall great people to be around! We have this habit that if there is a difficult or annoying customer contact, we usually discuss it so we can just move on and not dwell on it which makes it easier to deal with the next contact. Our boss is also very understanding, flexible and she has a great sense of humor even though our jokes sometimes are too much for her.

When I started to work in the summer, I was instantly taken into the jokes and all the things that were going on since the working culture and atmosphere is so welcoming! My coworkers were instantly fond of my habit of changing dialects on every call and it was a nice introductory joke that still lives on six months later!

Lassila & Tikanoja has a quarterly survey where you can vote on a coworker who is just a great person to work with and has good expertise in their respectable job. I had the honor that my coworkers voted for me in the last quarter and the executives decided among 13 candidates that I was one of the 3 who shall have this honor which I am very grateful from my coworker, I appreciate all of you!

Author: Elias Lounaskorpi