April has been the month of short weeks and although we all look forward to those extra days off and long weekends, they can certainly make managing work priorities challenging (fitting 5 busy days’ work into 4). When you then add in busy work travel getting around NZ meeting with customers into the mix and things certainly take on another life. Jo and I have had very busy months travel wise visiting customers both in the North & South Island during March and April and this is only possible because of the support that we get from ‘the team’ back at home base.
I would like to take the opportunity to introduce you to a couple of the ‘sales team’ who you don’t get to see very often but, are back at JFS base receiving and processing orders, monitoring shipments, checking inventory levels and generally our go to people.
I’ll start with Wendy Eustace (Sales Support Co-ordinator) first who has been with Jenkins since 2017. Wendy’s role is quite diverse but one of her key functions is the monitoring of the [email protected] mailbox where customer orders come into and any inquiries via our website. This ensures that orders are processed and dispatched in a timely manner. Some days the traffic in this mailbox is high and processing needs to be done quickly to meet the timelines of transport companies, then the phone is going non-stop. Even with this all going on she can still manage to make an urgent request or change an order happen. A couple of weeks ago a customer made a last-minute change to an order, Wendy was able to work with our operations team to ensure the change happened. It was great that Wendy got an email thanking and telling her she was a ‘rock star’ it was cool to see a smile on her face for that feedback. One of the other projects Wendy has been working on is the upgrade on our website so please make sure you go and check out this refreshed version - www.jenkinsfps.co.nz
The newest addition to our team is Alex Bousslat (Inventory & Imports Co-ordinator) so we are truly balanced team of 3 x men and 3 x women haha. We managed to poach Alex from our Technical Services team (they say he has come over to the dark side haha) and he started with sales last September. Alex’s qualifications and experience are in maths, inventory, and customer service. It really was a baptism of fire for him on his start because his starting coincided with the start of what has been an ongoing battle with international freight delays due to Covid-19, leading to an international supply chain that was under enormous (and still is) pressure. He took it all in his stride and has set up systems so we as a team have transparency on all our import shipments, along with being a great communicator. Alex has already showed off his customer service skills by driving to Auckland and collecting an airfreight shipment from the airport and dropping off the product to our customer to ensure they kept packing. Truly going the extra mile to ensure customer satisfaction and confirming that we keep our customer front of mind with everything we do.
In signing off I want to acknowledge that it is our whole team’s dedication and pride in their work that is helping lead us to success.