Service Coordinator Shari Lamping: “My job is fulfilling, challenging, and personal”
Shari Lamping is committed to serving Fastems’ customers, come rain or come shine. Her job is essential in making the service process run smoothly for customers, even on their most stressful days.
Shari Lamping is a crucial point of contact both for the customers and for the Fastems team.
Having started at Fastems as an administrative assistant in 2009, Shari Lamping took on a new challenge in January 2020 by becoming a Service Coordinator.
There are many words to describe Shari’s job, and none quite cover the whole picture, but “fulfilling, challenging, and personal” make a good start:
Fulfilling
As a service coordinator, Shari has a uniquely holistic view of the processes at Fastems LLC “I basically see the process through from the first call to the final billing” she says.
This means she needs to be available to coordinate between the customers and the Fastemsians.
“If I’ve sent a guy on a weekend out into the field, I’m going to be available if he tries to call me. Because he’s on my radar, and I’ve assigned him to this customer and we’re working on this together. So, I think it’s almost like a partnership that you have with your techs and a partnership you have with your customer.”
If a system goes down on Saturday, people generally don’t want to wait until Monday at 9am to get it solved, so Shari may end up working odd and/or long hours, and even during weekends. Thanks to her long years of experience at Fastems, Shari can quickly identify what kind of problem the customer is facing and can send out the best persons for the job, all while assuring the customer. Shari says helping others is a fulfilling and rewarding part of her job, especially when she gets to do it from start to finish, and when she feels that her job has strengthened a customer relationship or upped the likelihood of repeating business.
Challenging
At the start, Shari found her new role a bit challenging:
“The transition was somewhat challenging because I had never been in a role in service. All you’re dealing with is problems all day, and I had never been in that type of role before. People don’t call to say their Fastems system is running great; they call when they have an issue.”
Shari did a lot of self-directed learning in the first weeks of her new positions, gaining additional knowledge about the systems and how to talk to customers when something goes wrong.
Shari has found the answer to be surprisingly simple, to assure the customer that you hear them- “Sometimes it’s just the basic act of acknowledging the feeling, the sense of “I have a major problem, and no one cares”, and assure them that someone does understand the importance of their issues, and that Fastems, or the service team specifically, is committed to solving it.
It took a while to adjust to the new role, especially during COVID, “It was challenging, but we’re good now” Shari laughed. Now, even with the option of going back to the office, Shari works most days from home. Working from home removes the commute, and Shari said she is able to focus just as well – if not even better – working from home compared to working at the office.
Personal
Shari is a people’s person, and this is a huge asset in her daily tasks. “I want to bring value to every interaction I have with people. I’m a people person! It applies in personal life as well as in business”.
This people-centric attitude, and belief that everyone makes up an important piece of the puzzle, ties in with a quote that Shari used to clarify this: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it-you can influence it.”
See Shari talk about her job at Fastems here: Shari’s interview