Productivity and efficiency have significantly improved within Sales & Admin in recent years, and one of the best BPES team members to talk to about it is our own Internal Sales & Administrator, Carol Brooks!
What does a typical day look like for you at BPES?
“As Internal Sales & Administrator, my typical day at BPES consists of: processing orders, accounting and making up parts kits for service engineers. I also do a lot of the purchasing and logistics for BPES as well as internal audits.
An additional part of my role includes following up sales enquiries and repeat orders for our Thomson range of laboratory consumables such as flasks. We saw a notable upturn in demand for these products during the pandemic which has kept me very busy.”
What is your favourite thing about your role?
“I used to be a PA and what I really enjoyed about being PA was that I always had a mixture of tasks and jobs, and I always had a touch point with everyone I worked with in the office. Now that I work in sales and admin for BPES, my experience as a PA has transferred to my current role perfectly. I don’t just do one job, I love that I can multitask and be organised.
I also love that my role gives me the opportunity to form relationships with customers and suppliers and as a team, we’re all on good terms and we also have great working conditions here – there’s much not to dislike really!”
How has your role at BPES changed since joining?
“I never thought that this would be the case during my lifetime, but we’re almost paperless here, so we’ve become a lot more modern which is a huge benefit – we’ve taken full advantage of modern cloud-based solutions which have really improved productivity.
We’ve introduced a lot more sales staff, to grow the company and specialise in different areas as we do so. It was becoming impossible for Tom, and BPES in general, to stretch ourselves any further; we could be working in the office and not seeing Tom for about three or four weeks (and we missed him dearly!).
We have staff placed regionally around the country now which makes it easier to service our customers. We work really well together as a little team and so far, it’s worked out well!”
In your experience, what makes BPES stand out from others in the industry?
“Customer service; it’s the personal contact with customers. We are a small team and ensure we’re there for our customers at every stage of a sale. I think we’re unique like that, in a sense that if customers want to speak to us, they know they can pick up the phone or email us and they know that we’ll get back to them and fulfil their enquiries as soon as we can.
We thrive on the personal touch at BPES, we don’t want this to be something that’s normalised as we evolve. In essence, we don’t want to get to a stage where people assume that the phrase “Can I speak to a human?” is going to be inevitable.
The way we import goods, particularly consumables, is what makes BPES stand out from others too. We aim to do it on a weekly basis, so if we’ve got a customer that requires a product, providing it’s in stock with the manufacturer, we can get it to them within a week. This is something that isn’t really heard of with our competitors. Like everyone else we have experienced significant supply issues over the last few years, so communication with our customers has become even more critical.”
Want to find out more about the BPES team? Discover our ‘Inside BPES‘ series today!
