project manager

client advisor

technician

maintenance technician

associate

SEVERN TRENT

I worked at severn trent Derby call center for 6 years and have seen the company change alot in that time

To start with it was a good, caring and compassionate company, especially after leaving retail.

But quickly after a year it changed. New management that did not know how to run a call center, recruiting their friends in to high positions which they had no clue what to do. Decisions that make no sense from a customer or business standpoint

These decisions would lead to increase calls which would then get blamed on staff for being too slow which was not the case. Constantly there was at least 80-150 people in the queue and the stats to manage these stressed and demotivated staff

And if you spoke up about it or went against the grain you were singled out and taken to disciplinaries for basically having an opinion

They claim to be all big on mental health which is laughable at best. If you go off for a week or more they will call you every other day to see when you're coming back - even if you are off with a doctors note or very sick in hospital.

Progression is only there if you are managers favourites. Currently they have said anyone that gets a new internal job can't move for 3-5 months as they are too understaffed and busy in the call center. This is just demoralising staff and forcing them to leave, there are only a handful of staff that have been there more than 12 months, this leads to confusion about what to do for new agents. 

The 10 week rotation they have is set but you always get asked to move your shift. Sometimes they do it without asking you and less than a few hours notice, so watch out for this. Very hard to plan life around this. 

Customers were typical customers. Some nice, some horrible, always got the flack from bad customers, some extremely rude and management would just tell you that it's your job to listen to it and "turn the call around" 

Training is next to useless, not realistic of the call center environment 

No job security for any role you go for as constantly moving people back to phones as they can't keep staff. They moved a whole webchat team back to the phones and replaced them with offshore agents in India without even asking anyone's thoughts. Everyone was told it would work out great and it has not, many of these agents that were moved have now left as they were demoralised. 

I would not recommend staying in this job for more than 6 months to 1 year or you won't move. Turnover is extremely high. 

This is by far one of the worst jobs I've ever had.

Their training team are (with the exception of a few) incredibly bad and provide sub-par quality information and assistance, especially with new starters.

The management are shocking, and care about nothing but hitting call targets and "selling" Homeserve to customers (but pass it off as just offering, even though they want you to force as many people through as possible.)

Their customer comment system is terrible, and they will penalise the agent if someone leaves a bad score or comment about wait times or process, or anything at all completely out of the agents control.

There is next to no progression available too. They'll pretend there is by giving people opportunities at operational transfers, which just means "go through the hiring process, have the right experience and do well, work for less money doing the same job for 6 months and then go back on the phones the minute we get busy." They don't care about anything other than having enough people to sit there and take boring and abusive calls, and will discipline you if you disconnect calls on abusive customers.

The working hours are reviewed a lot and somehow are always worse than what was in place before. On Saturdays and evenings between 6-9pm there is next to no staff, but it somehow shocks them that they end up with 30+ minute call queues for a handful of customers and the staff just don't care enough to even respond to customer complaints about it when they come through.

You really need to be incredibly apathetic to even coast through this job. There's a reason they have no staff and their existing staff, even people who've been there for years, are constantly looking for other jobs.

Working in IOC was Emotionally taxing. 
Dealing with customers can be difficult and this is made more difficult with management constantly monitoring you, you feel pressurised constantly from all sides.
In addition a taff are  only allowed ten minutes per day to go to the toilet some shifts are ten hours long and this doesn’t change. You are expected to go in your two 15 minute breaks or the half hour lunch, if you go over ten minutes management highlight you have gone over the time limit to the whole floor via email and if you go over repeatedly you will get in trouble and the management make out that you may eventually lose your job adding more pressure, uncertainty and stress, this makes you feel like a child who can’t make their own mind as to when to go to the toilet.
A new call out system was brought in where you automatically call people, sometimes calling the same person multiple times or if they have paid their bill but it hasn’t updated on the system which can be embarrassing and can make the customer angry and rude/ abusive.
The job is monotonous, and although quite easy can be quite emotionally taxing as you don’t know What mood the caller will be in. Interdepartmental cohesion is poor especially with the billing department who take no ownership of customers issues.
On a positive note the floor staff are great and really friendly you couldn’t ask to work with more supportive people, in addition you can learn a lot from a job in ioc but not for long as it is dead end, poorly paying and stressful.

The people at SevernTrent really make the job worth it. At least in engineering and planning, most people are positive, upbeat, really care about the work they do and always go above and beyond to deliver to our customers.

Frequently there is a lack of reward in the company. There is a company wide bonus but this rarely relates directly to your personal achievements. The salaries are usually lower than average. When moving around within the organisation HR have a fixed salary increase percentile, if you request over this you will be rejected. No such thing exists for external people coming in, which is nonsense. Why is Severn Trent actively punishing it's internal employees for staying loyal to the company? Most people in the business feel overworked and underpayed, but frequently this isn't paired with high stress levels, unless you're in a project management role. Additionally should be stated that the company no longer provides private medical insurance.

The IT technology of the company frequently gives everyone a headache, and even if you have the money to create a solution, delivery of the solution you want is usually impossible unless it aligns with inflexible IT Strategy. Defintiely a massive lack of trust to engineers, who commonly have formal software training, of the organisation on behalf of "Cyber Security". On the flip side this does have it's benefits - even with a little bit of IT knowledge you can make a huge difference to many employee's.

The first few weeks of training were great, a very fun and exciting experience however that took a drastic turn as soon as we were actually put on the phones. We were assured it was not a massively stat driven environment however that has proven to be incorrect. The job is mentally draining with long 10 hour shifts where you are expected to just take call after call and if you take too long writing your notes to get a moment between calls you are penalised for your talk time stat dropping. If you take too many toilet breaks and go over your allotted 10 minutes of comfort break a day then you are also pulled aside and told not to have it happen again. They expect you to act like robots and if you do not hit those targets for a few weeks then there are threats of you losing your job which just loads on the anxiety. They say they care about their customers but they definitely do not care about their employees.

One of my least favourite things is that if there is a problem and there is no support around to assist you or you've asked to many questions that day so those that are available on your team ignore you, you are then in trouble for trying to takr the time to figure it out yourself as this takes too long and impacts your stats.

Management say that they offer support but to be honest I have only seen this for people they like, same goes for any type of progression.

The turnover rate is very high and you would struggle to find someone in the office that has been there over 12 months.

I wanted to like this job so bad and have tried to change my mindset but it becomes less tolerable with every day.

I worked here for 20 months via an agency on a temporary contract.
My work here was broke up between supporting field workers on the phone by providing additional information about jobs. I also was responsible for dealing with Lone worker a system which dealt with the health and safety of field workers. We also raised jobs for contractors and vetted the purchasing orders when the work was completed among other tasks.

As i had not worked in an office environment before this position helped diversify my skills and all the different processes and decision making and initiative required especially helped with this.

My manager was reasonably helpful and provided support when it was needed and when i initially informed her that i was looking for part time work so i could spend more time starting my business was fully supportive and later offered for me to cut back my hours to part-time to keep me in the company which was extremely helpful.

The hardest part of the job for me was being sat down all day as i am quite an active person and don't like to be sat still for too long i found this very difficult.

Although the work was quite monotonous at times, it was varied and the responsibility for things such as lone worker were always interesting and rewarding.

First of all, shout out to the people who looked after the COSC (Customer Operations Service Centre) academy because they were great folks with lots of patience and always ready to help.

Overall, very disappointing. They won't tell you during your training how micromanaged you are going to be when your training and academy are finished. Everything you do is monitored and measured, even comfort breaks (you'll need them). Every error is recorded on your score card. 
Before I joined Severn Trent, I thought it will be less a call centre and more a company that care about their staff wellbeing. Turned out that Severn Trent is more micromanaged, stats driven and stressful than any other call centre I've worked at before. 
I have seen relaxed and happy co workers but they work in different departments where they're not constantly watched. COSC is a very challenging, mentally draining department.

If you like the idea of sitting down with your headset and listening to never-ending complaints knowing that your calls are monitored and measured (time spent with customer, hold time, pauses, silences, tone and words you use), it's a job for you, but if not, then look somewhere else.

Overall Severn Trent are a decent employer with some good benefits eg. Pension/ sharesave etc. 

The role of an interworks Tanker Driver is an easy straight forward job which you are left alone to get on with, you generally get 4/5 short distance load movements per day with plenty of time to complete them.

There are some issues with the terms and conditions for Tanker Drivers:

2 tier pay contract meaning anyone starting after 2018 is on around 4K per year less than those that were there prior.

Be wary of taking a shift pattern that involves 1 or both days of the weekend,  they make it almost impossible to get off this pattern and Mon- Fri drivers and agency drivers are much better looked after eg. They will get an allocated truck and you will drive 2/3 per week.

Some of the managers are really good professional people, some are absolutely shocking in there lack of knowledge and people skills, there are way too many managers and planners per head making a straight forward job more complicated than necessary.

Don't join the union, they work for the management and are responsible for overseeing the unfair T's + C's.

If they got their house in order It could be one of the best jobs industry but at the moment it's nowhere near.



I was lucky here as I only lived 15 minutes away for my place of work, but once there I had a company van to use to get me round the sites that I have to visit. Once on site there was a various task that had to be carried out from taking sample reading to checking flow meters, settlement tanks to desludge blockages in inlets to remove, sparge holes on filter beds to clear and other tasks to sort out, not just on one site but others as well.

That water was a lot more precious that I first thought, that you can recycle human waste, and that the only waste was rags that blocked up the inlet.

Management was very good, they had the answers to your problems because many of them had done the job before you.

The older guys were the best because they like the management had seen it all before and were prepared to share what they knew with you rather than keep it from you,

Taking it all in from the word go, learning where all the sites were that needed visiting, when new tech stuff came in was sometimes hard to get your head round as everything before hand was very hands on and manually operated.

Knowing that you were doing something for the enviourment, cleaning the waterways and recycling water.

I will open this review by acknowledging I was let go from thei position. Indeed it was my fault, where I had not been taught how to properly collate my mileage expenses from travel, combined with a parking ticket. So I won't dwell on my specific case, but instead on the culture in this company. In my role I visited many of the varyijg labs, treatment works, and reservoirs; and the story was the same everywhere. Underpaid for a highly responsible, skilled, and strenuous job. Which is bad on its own; but this combined with a vindictive culture of distrusting staff, back stabbing, no reward for going the extra mile. To say I felt exploited was an understatement, all they want in this role is to be a mindless drone who will repeatedly do the same task, not ask questions and keep your mouth shut. Creativity, or individuality is quickly quashed. This isn't a biased opinion speak to any ignore the below managerial level staff and the answer will be the same. Exploited for a highly sophisticated and responsible role, and then treated as undervallued following this.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Project manager 44 salaries reported	£44,582 per year
Client advisor 20 salaries reported	£26,253 per year
Technician 40 salaries reported	£31,745 per year
Maintenance technician 25 salaries reported	£41,676 per year
Associate 69 salaries reported	£36,632 per year

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