Skills Support for the Workforce

Adopstar make the most of customer service training available through Heart of the South West Apprenticeship Service

Adopstar is an advertising operations company with over 17 years’ experience in the online advertising industry. They provide a complete ad operations service ranging from trafficking through to training and full ad server migrations. They have a specialist technical operations team who can help implement integrations, along with creative troubleshooting and building. They also have a development team and revenue optimisation.

Education and Training Skills (ETS), one of Serco’s training providers, contacted Adopstar to talk about opportunities to access fully funded training for the business through Heart of the South West Apprenticeship Service.

Heart of the South West Apprenticeship Service provides fully funded training and support to equip businesses in Devon and Somerset with the skills they need to grow. The service can provide businesses with recognised accredited qualifications and bespoke training courses for their employees, and business support to enable them to take advantage of Apprenticeship opportunities. Education and Training Skills (ETS) is part of Serco’s network of expert organisations chosen to deliver the programme on behalf of Heart of the South West Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP). This programme is co-financed by the European Social Fund and the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

Following initial contact from ETS, a series of meetings took place between Sarah Gibbs, an ETS Training Facilitator, and Theresa Benson, Managing Director at Adopstar, to discuss tailored training solutions to meet Adopstar’s business needs. Theresa was very keen to support her staff development and saw this as an integral part in growing her business. Following detailed discussions with Sarah about the most suitable training for each team member, it was decided that a combination of group courses and individual unit qualifications would best support the team at Adopstar.

The training began with courses in Time Management & Prioritising, Excellent Customer Service and Telephone Techniques, Assertiveness and Building Personal Confidence, Managing Individual Performance and Minutes of Meetings. The sessions were delivered in the workplace and provided a good opportunity for peer to peer learning and reflection of own practice to improve performance in the workplace.

The feedback from the team was very positive and has helped to improve processes and individual skills in areas like customer service skills on the telephone, managing individuals and improved recording of meeting minutes.

There was a number of progressions at Adopstar following the delivery of training:

  • Hallie Downing has progressed as a result of her training and is currently managing the website content project’
  • Ben Field confirmed the time management training has helped him supervising his team, for example with appraisals and reviews, which has in turn benefitted the team.
  • Cameron Norsworthy is now managing client relations and has progressed really well.
  • N.Slate has been able to improve customer responses positively and take on more responsibilities and tasks.

Theresa Benson, Managing Director at Adopstar said:

“We saw this as an opportunity to help further develop the customer service knowledge and skills of our vibrant workforce, through vocational based training solutions.

“My team all thoroughly enjoyed the courses and ETS were always on hand to help whenever needed. It was really nice that staff could choose which courses they felt would benefit them the most. They all worked extremely hard on the units and it was great to see them all pass.

“To access this fully funded training has been a great benefit to my company and I can’t recommend it highly enough.”

To find out about accessing fully funded training and business support through Heart of the South West Apprenticeship Service, businesses can contact us here. Alternatively email us via hotswapprenticeships@serco.com or ring 01752 968026.

Latest News

Keep up to date with news from Skills Support for the Workforce

Find out more