Customer Services Advisor

Ashford & St. Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; Chertsey; On-site; GBP 26,000 - 28,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading NHS Foundation Trust in Chertsey is seeking a Full-time Customer Services Advisor to support a 24/7 Switchboard Service. This role involves managing calls, providing customer support, and ensuring accurate record-keeping for effective operations. Candidates should possess GCSE level qualifications in Maths and English and customer-focused experience. The position offers a salary ranging from £26,240 to £27,928, reflecting additional enhancements for night and weekend shifts.

Benefits

Annual leave

Employee benefits including health and wellbeing programs

Qualifications

• Must have customer focused experience, ideally in an NHS setting.
• Strong communication skills are essential.
• Ability to work under pressure and manage calls effectively.

Responsibilities

• Provide Switchboard service to Trust employees and the public.
• Manage emergency calls and respond to urgent requests.
• Maintain accurate records of calls and incidents.

Skills

Customer focused experience

Strong communication skills

Problem solving

Education

GCSE level qualifications (Maths & English) or equivalent

IT qualifications

Job description

Customer Services Advisor

The closing date is 16 January 2026.

We are currently looking for a Full time Customer Services Advisor to join our Customer Services Team based at St. Peter's Hospital. The post is to provide support towards a 24/7 Switchboard Service, working on an 8‑week rotating rota. The job will also require someone who can work weekends, night shifts and bank holidays. The staff member will also be an active member of the Estates and Facilities Helpdesk and provide administrative support to Estates and Facilities staff when necessary.

Switchboard is often the first contact for patients, visitors, GPs, companies and contractors who contact the Trust, so the initial impression you give is what counts. Good communication skills are essential for this role.

You will play a key role in enabling the Customer Services function to maintain and develop relationships with Service End Users by effectively handling enquiries on a wide range of service‑related issues. You must have strong communication skills, be good at problem solving and be aware of the need for good customer care.

Main duties of the job

To work as part of a team of Customer Service Advisors on a busy switchboard, providing a quality response service to Trust employees, members of the general public and other health organisations and deliver a "one stop shop" Helpdesk Service for staff.

It is imperative to have a good understanding of the written procedures and practices of the Switchboard equipment and its operation, to ensure the smooth and safe operation of the centralised Switchboard service. This includes inter‑site telecommunication links, emergency numbers, internal paging system, central alarm systems and fallback systems.

Accurate record‑keeping, including fault reporting, emergency calls received and made, alarm activations, major incidents and system failures.

To operate the Estates and Facilities Helpdesk, logging maintenance calls and printing and entering Facilities Department data, maintaining close working relationships with all other Trust Departments. Liaise and chase through queries with Estates and Facilities teams via the Helpdesk on the status of work orders and report back to the customer to ensure the customer is kept informed of the current situation.

The post involves a considerable amount of liaison with other staff and the public. Therefore it is essential that the post holder adopts a courteous, friendly and professional manner at all times.

About us

Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust serves a population of more than 410,000 people living in North‑West Surrey, parts of Hounslow and beyond.

Over 3,700 highly trained doctors, nurses, midwives, therapists, healthcare scientists and other support staff make up our workforce, providing a wide range of services across our two hospital sites: Ashford, Ashford, Surrey and St Peter's, Chertsey, Surrey.

We also run many specialist clinics in the community and local community hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

Our vision is to be one of the best healthcare Trusts in the country. Join us now in the NHS at Ashford & St Peters Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with our strong commitment to staff health and wellbeing. We are committed to providing continuous professional development, staff benefits and flexibility to shape our workforce around patient care.

Job responsibilities

To support the department and organisation by carrying out any other duties that reasonably fit within the broad scope of a job of this grade and type of work.

Switchboard Role

• Provide a centralised Switchboard Service to both Ashford & St Peter's Hospitals.
• Ensure that Service Level Agreements negotiated with other health and non‑health organisations for the delivery of Switchboard, Alarm monitoring and other operational duties are adhered to in respect of service delivery, response and quality.
• Receive external telephone calls and route them to the correct hospital extension, department or individual.
• Monitor progress of calls, routing them elsewhere if the extension is engaged or not responding.
• Receive internal telephone calls from hospital extensions and route them via telephonist dialing to an external destination.
• Receive requests for paging of individual staff, initiate the paging call and connect the person to be paged with the telephone extension.
• Respond immediately to requests for emergency group or individual voice‑over paging (e.g. cardiac arrest) and pass precise details of the emergency request to the end user.
• Work effectively as part of a team and individually to ensure departmental and personal targets are achieved, including overall operator response times and individual call volume answering rates.
• Maintain a thorough understanding of written procedures and practices of Switchboard equipment and its operation to ensure safe and smooth operation, including inter‑site telecommunication links, emergency numbers, internal paging system, BMS central alarm system and fallback systems.
• Accurate record‑keeping, including fault reporting, emergency calls received and made, alarm activations, major incidents, equipment received and forwarded from the Department and system failures.
• Liaise with the Telecommunications Manager, third‑party contractors and maintainers in relation to fault reporting and rectification.
• During out‑of‑hours you will have specific responsibility to liaise with Site Coordinators, On‑call Personnel and third parties to make quick operational and escalation decisions in respect to telecommunication system failures and unforeseen operational difficulties.
• Answer immediately medical/surgical/security/fire emergency calls via the Trust's Emergency extension 2222 and carry out the appropriate written procedure to contact the appropriate emergency on‑call teams.
• Have a good understanding of departmental on‑call rotas, the correct method of on‑call escalation and personnel contactability.
• Observe and respond to any alarm panels and PC‑based alarm monitoring systems (fire, medical gas, paging, telephone systems, burglar, boiler house and other plant) and follow written procedure when alarms are activated or calls are received from other alarm reception centres or sites.
• Act as an effective member of the Trust's Major Incident Team, receiving emergency calls and implementing a large‑scale call‑out procedure. Participate in regular exercises and may be contacted outside normal working hours during a major incident/exercise for help or attendance.
• Co‑ordinate, respond and liaise with the Security Officers & CCTV Co‑ordinator via two‑way radio, telephone and paging systems in relation to security alerts and requests.

Person Specification

• GCSE level qualification (Maths & English) or an equivalent.
• IT qualifications.

Knowledge

• Switchboard or Call Centre knowledge.
• Knowledge of Helpdesks.

Experience

• Customer focused experience.
• NHS experience.

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary to submit a Disclosure to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Employer name

Ashford & St. Peter's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

£26,240 to £27,928 a year pa inc HCAS plus enhancement for nights and weekend work pro rata