Meet Gradvert Coach Alison Burgess

Gradvert believes in improving business performance by improving people. Its coaches work up and down the country with organisations of all sizes. Here Alison Burgess, one of its associate coaches in learning and development, talks about her relationship with the company and explains how her customer engagement workshops benefit clients.

How did your relationship with Gradvert come about?

I started working with Gradvert almost two years ago. At my first meeting with Michaela and the team I immediately got that feeling that this was a great organisation to work for.

With Gradvert, I was struck by the high quality of the work and how much the team cares about everything that they do. The feedback from Gradvert clients is always excellent because of the quality of the programmes they deliver.

Everything is completely tailored to the client, which is a fantastic approach as every business has a whole different set of needs. The more you understand a business, the more you can take a concept like customer service and make it real. That in itself is quite fascinating – to take the principle and then really make it work for different types of organisations.

You deliver customer engagement training. Tell us about this work.

I have over 20 years of experience designing and delivering customer engagement workshops. One of my clients is Polygon, where we carried out a one-day workshop after they identified that their customer service was inconsistent.

This has now been rolled out across the whole organisation to people in numerous different roles to achieve a much better level of service.

To date 362 delegates have been on the programme, which has been such a success that Polygon is keeping it as part of the on-boarding process for new people who join the business.

Avanti Kitchens is another great company I’ve worked with. We delivered a two-day programme that was very sales-focused.

The aim was for all delegates to be a sales professional, as opposed to a sales person, and still maintain strong customer service. The first two groups achieved a 92% satisfaction score, with one more group still to go through the programme.

It’s very rewarding when you see such excellent results.

You also deliver Apprenticeship Levy workshops. How does that work?

It’s quite fascinating to understand what the Apprenticeship Levy is all about. Rather than apprenticeships in the traditional sense of the word, the Levy can be used for high level and very challenging leadership and management qualifications, so the whole team benefits.

It’s why Gradvert’s unique 360° approach is so important when it comes to appraising an organisation’s people strategy. My work is to help embed this and bring my experience of Leadership and Management into the apprenticeship space, delivering funded programmes for employers who want to develop their teams and take their business performance to the next level.

Funded by an employer’s Levy contributions, I work and partner with Gradvert to deliver bespoke solutions for those businesses who are embarking on the training and development of their teams, which are tailored to both individual and organisational needs.

I think we need to refocus people’s perceptions and let them know what a brilliant opportunity it is to get the most out of the money they put in to upskill their workforce.