How good are your juggling skills? Can you keep lots of balls in the air at the one time and still keep a cool head and a smile on your face?
Before you run away and join a circus, why not put your abilities to good use as front-of-house customer services for a business that will appreciate your talents. Every organisation needs a Receptionist, someone who can meet and greet visitors and make a great first impression.
You need to be warm and welcoming, but also highly professional, able to operate the switchboard – and know who should be on speed-dial and who you can afford to temporarily leave on hold.
At any one time you might have to deal with phones ringing off their hooks, visitors queued up at the desk and couriers waiting impatiently for your signature on their keypads.
How do you prioritise all these demands on your time without tearing your hair out?
It takes great judgment to do this customer services job properly and lots of common sense.
You need to be willing to understand the business and get to know the personnel, because that’s how you’ll come to hone your decisions and keep the whole show dancing along in harmony like the chorus line of Cats.
Some Receptionists double up as Administrators, keeping on top of the red tape and paperwork and making travel arrangements for staff.
Work in a hotel or sports club and you could also be responsible for making bookings and handling cash, while at the same time dealing with all the other day-to-day goings on. If all this sounds like fun, it could be that you’ve got the right attitude for this kind of career.
Do it well and you’ll become indispensable, you’ll be the go-to person for just about everything – so decide at the outset that you’ll do the job with discretion and you’ll have the satisfaction of being seen as a safe pair of hands, trusted by everyone from the Janitor to the Manager to the Chief Executive.
Comedy programmes have always relied on Receptionists for laughs. From Dawn in The Office, who had to suffer David Brent as her boss, right back to Sybil in Fawlty Towers, who would smoke a cigarette, gossip on the phone to friends, yell at poor Basil, while all the time entirely ignoring guests.
It’s not like that any more, thank goodness. Today’s Receptionists are smart, switched-on and highly competent. They work in all sorts of places, from local authority housing offices to the marble foyers of multi-nationals. They need to be able to deal with whoever walks through the door, whether that’s an angry customer or a client on whose business the entire organisation relies.
It takes Olympic-standard people skills to be able to deal with visitors at either end of the corporate spectrum, especially if they all turn up at your reception desk at exactly the same time.
And that’s good news for you and your organisation but especially for poor put-upon Basil!
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