Partner Article

Santa?s Gateshead grotto gears up for Christmas

A North East firm is taking on more than a hundred staff in the run-up to Christmas - to ensure that there are no disappointed children on Christmas morning.

Gateshead-based contact centre specialist Spark Response has the task of playing Santa’s little helper to ensure all orders are delivered by Christmas Eve.

With 95%-plus of a typical e-commerce retailer’s orders now made online, as opposed to the more traditional channels of telephone or catalogue, Spark has around 70,000 orders to despatch every day for clients such as Toys R Us and Cancer Research UK’s Shop to Beat Cancer.

Peter Slee, Spark Response’s managing director, said: “We’ll take on up to 120 temporary staff for a period of around three months to supplement our core out-of-season staff of around 180. It’s a great story to be able to tell in tough times and, what’s even nicer is that 20 to 30 of our seasonal staff come back year after year.”

The busiest two days for Spark tend to be the last Saturday in November and the first in December. “Being very much a people-oriented business with a team approach, we invite all our staff to work a shift in the fulfilment centre on these days,” said Peter. “We call this our ‘Part of the Action’ initiative and it gives everyone a real feel for what the operation is about at the peak of its activity.”

They always get a good turnout and Peter feels it is particularly helpful for staff from Spark’s contact centre to see the other side of the operation.

“These are the guys who take the orders and deal with queries and complaints,” he pointed out. “This is when they really get to see the bigger picture. When you consider the contact centre only sees up to 5% of these orders coming through by phone but 100% of the queries, they can’t get a feel for the true scale unless they see it for themselves.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .