Customer Services Assistant

at  Heriot Watt University

Role: Customer Services Assistant
Grade and Salary: Grade 4, £23,581 - £26,038 per annum (Pro-Rata)
FTE and working pattern: 12.75hrs per week, 35 weeks out of 52 per year
Holiday Entitlement: 28 days annual leave plus 9 buildings closed days (and Christmas Eve when it falls on a weekday) (Pro-Rata)

PURPOSE OF ROLE

To provide, as part of a team, a high-quality, professional and efficient service by responding to and resolving where possible enquiries from all customers about the Information Services Directorate’s services and functions and helping to ensure that IS’s resources, facilities and services are available and accessible.
You are required to provide an effective professional support service to Information Services customers: students, distance learning students, teaching staff, external borrowers, staff and student visitors from other institutions, researchers and the general public. You will provide an inclusive and consistent service appropriate to the needs of the customers regardless of any barriers such as language or disabilities, by conducting ongoing dialogue to establish individual requirements.
You will provide front-line support to enable customers to access HWU IT facilities and services, including email and printing, basic maintenance of equipment (e.g filling printers), and facilitate the borrowing and returns service, including dealing with lending material, renewals, returns, recalls and reservations, re-shelving lending material in a timely manner, undertaking basic stock management tasks eg RFID tagging, as and when required by customers.
You will monitor and administer bookings for physical spaces within our managed premises and record occupancy and building usage levels to inform future planning. You will report faults, both systems related and building issues.
You will provide back-up for the Inter-library loans assistant, dealing with enquires, issuing and returning items lent to HWU from other libraries.
You will be required to open and/or close the building, un/setting alarms, ensuring all machinery is switched on/off, particularly when the building is secured at the end of the evening during vacation.

KEY DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

Enquiries and Information skills
You will offer regular first line and second line (where possible) support, face to face at the Service Desk and irregularly by telephone, by email and via social media regarding IS services, particularly related to borrowing library stock and access to library services. You will establish the nature and extent of the enquiry received from customers. You will decide whether or not you have the skills and knowledge to resolve the enquiry. If so, you will utilise online systems, standard resources or refer to printed sources: if not, you will refer the customer to a specialist colleague.
Professional development
You will attend training to update existing and develop new skills to ensure you can fulfil your current role and any new responsibilities consistent with this role.
Personal attributes
As a Customer Services Assistant you will be required to communicate regularly, both orally and in writing. You will be allocated tasks daily: these tasks may rotate according to agreed procedures. You will establish, through discussion with rest of the team members, how to prioritise required tasks daily. As a team member, you must be generally aware of fluctuations in demand for service and adjust to customer need daily.
When allocated personal tasks, you will prioritise daily and team-based requirements to meet required deadlines. You will need to prioritise roving and monitoring tasks within the library building, for example, monitoring space, emptying book bins, collecting statistics (headcounts), with the demands of queue management at the service desk and maintaining printers in other buildings.