Carol Hopwood's Story - Service with Respect Campaign

13 October 2020

3 minute read.

 

Carpenters Group are proud to support the the 'Service with Respect' campaign in association with The Institute of Customer Service. Read more about it here

 

Carol Hopwood's Story

We've interviewed our front-line colleagues across our Insurance Services and Legal Services departments to hear their first-hand insight. 

“I’m the Head of Serious and Catastrophic Injury at Carpenters Group, having joined in 2018.

The past few months has been a test of all our resilience and flexibility. We have had to innovate rapidly to ensure that we have been able to continue delivering our usual high standard of customer care.

The client interaction and fighting to ensure that they receive the best possible outcomes is the reason I do this job and so it has been very rewarding to largely overcome the challenges during the pandemic. Switching to video calls with clients has really helped and to be honest I wonder why we didn’t do it as routine before now!

The team have been unwavering in their quest to ensure they deliver for their clients, but there have been difficult times. Understandably some clients have felt particularly isolated when they have not been able to see friends and family and this has led to heightened levels of worry and anxiety and changes in behaviour.  To address this, we have increased the frequency of our communication and have found video calls to be much more effective in reassuring clients than telephone conversations. We are better able to encourage them that we are on their side and still battling away on their behalf. We are all in this together, our clients and our teams are living in testing times so exercising patience and understanding is very important on both sides.

One of my clients recently told me that she loves our weekly video calls and it makes her do her hair and make-up so she starts the week well.  If it makes her feel better, that is a result, even if I do not have much information to update her with.”

About the author 

Carol Hopwood, Head of Serious and Catastrophic Injury

Carol qualified as a Solicitor in 1993. She is a Headway UK approved panel solicitor, founding trustee and secretary of Headway Sefton, UKABIF and APIL member. She is also the APIL North West Regional Co-ordinator. Having sold her own practice in 2013, she headed the Liverpool Catastrophic Injury Team for another national practice before joining Carpenters Group to become Head of the Serious and Catastrophic Injury Team.

Click here to read her full bio

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