Apprenticeships

Customer Service Practitioner     Level 2     Typical Duration: 15-18 Months

The first point of contact for a business and its customers

As a customer service practitioner, your core responsibility will be to provide a high-quality service to customers, which will be delivered from the workplace, digitally, or going into the customer’s own locality. These may be one-off or routine contacts and include dealing with orders, payments, offering advice, guidance and support, meet-and-greet, sales, fixing problems, after care, service recovery, or gaining insight through measuring customer satisfaction. You may be the first point of contact and work in any sector or organisation type. Your actions will influence the customer experience and their satisfaction with your organisation, so you’ll develop excellent customer service skills, as well as product and/or service knowledge when delivering to your customers. Your customer interactions may include face-to-face contact, telephone, post, email, text and social media.
Delivery is a blend of:

• Online content supporting the development of relevant knowledge, behaviours and skills, set by the standard
• Workshops and live content to underpin the e-learning resources
• Review meetings with the tutor and manager

Over the course of the apprenticeship, students build an electronic portfolio of evidence that showcases their knowledge, skills and behaviours. If apprentices do not already have Maths and English at level 2 or above, students will also study these as part of the apprenticeship standard. After a minimum of 12 months, when apprentices have completed their portfolio and are meeting the standard required, they progress to the final End Point Assessment (EPA)

Eligibility

People of all ages and educational backgrounds can become apprentices, but there are some restrictions, the most important of which are:

• The employer and the training provider must ascertain that the apprenticeship will allow the individual to gain substantive new skills. The training therefore needs to be materially different from any prior qualification or previous apprenticeship;
• The period of teaching and learning must be at least 12 months and, during this time, apprentices are expected to spend at least 6 hours a week of their time in “off the job” training. This must be part of their contracted working hours.
• Before the learner commences their apprenticeship standard, a functional skills initial assessment in English and Maths will be taken to match the appropriate standard and level.
• An assessment of their recognised prior learning will also take place.