All in a Days Work for Customer Service Girls

Denise O’Donnell and Jackie Gibson are Customer Liaison Officers working for United Utilities and their job is to ensure that wherever essential gas works are taking place they keep residents and traders up to date with the progress of the work and resolve any customer issues that may arise. Denise O’Donnell tells us about one of her typical days.

9.00 am
Jackie and I always start our week with a planning meeting and look at where our engineers will be working. As United Utilities manages around 36,000km of gas mains on behalf of Northern Gas Networks and cover an area from the Humber to the Scottish Borders and across to Cumbria with a population of 6.7m people, there are always opportunities to meet the public wherever our engineers are working.

10.00 am
Time to visit a street in Newcastle where our engineers will soon be starting work. I walk around the proposed site and look for any problems that may arise such as access routes for homes and businesses where our excavations will be. In one case, our excavations would have blocked the access to a church so we talked it over with the church so that everyone was happy.

11.00 am
A lot of the work United Utilities does involves replacing old metal gas pipes with more reliable new plastic pipes and this is what is happening now in parts of Walker. After meeting the engineering teams on site, I knock on local residents doors to make sure that they have received our previously hand delivered letters and also to ensure that if the gas supply has had to be disconnected ,that they are not suffering in any way because of it.

12.30 pm
Lunch is hastily eaten in the car before I drive off to the next location.
Whenever I go to a new area, I always do a risk assessment to look at any potential hazards that may tell me that the area is not safe to work in. By asking local shopkeepers and Community Police Officers about the area I can usually tell if it will be safe to work there. I also get an idea about any vulnerable customers who may live in the area and find out about anyone who may need extra special care.

13.30 pm
Safety is a major consideration when we dig up the roads. It is very important that children in particular don’t play on the excavations. A simple fall could result in broken bones or even worse! To get the message across, Jackie and I visit schools in the area where we are working to talk about gas safety and the danger of playing on our roadworks.

15:00 pm
Time to catch up with my paperwork in the car before attending a residents meeting about a new gas mains replacement scheme in Newcastle. These meetings are a great opportunity to meet the public and also to hear their concerns and resolve any issues before any digging has even taken place!

16.45 pm
Just time to pop into our local office to catch up on emails and look at the maps for tomorrow’s site visits. You never know what might happen from one day to the next as I meet different people all the time with different concerns and issues. I even met one customer who didn’t have a great deal to say as he was many hundreds of years old! He was a skeleton that was found when we dug up a historic part of Durham City – he was very well looked after and we treated him with the same respect we give to all of our customers!