Meet the team: customer service officer Siahn

“We get a whole variety of people coming in here and that’s really interesting.”

Meet Siahn, one of our friendly customer service officers. You’ll often find her behind the counter at the AC Baths/Taupō Events Centre.

Tell us about your job, Siahn

I’m a customer service officer at the AC Baths/Taupō Events Centre. I also do casual event work, and on top of that I’m a full-time student studying marine science and ecology. I’ve just finished my science degree and I’m moving on to a Master’s degree. I’m in Tauranga five days a week and I work here whenever I can get hours.

What does your job involve?

Our job is greeting the customers, taking phone calls and enquiries and payments, serving people, organising gym appointments, all that kind of clerical work, while at the same we’re always out the front for customer service.
When people come here we try to greet them all differently and say goodbye when they leave as well – we try to give that personal interaction.

We really work hard to make sure that our customer service is on par with the rest of council and is really personal. There’s a mum recently that came up and was struggling with her baby and her pram. She asked us to hold her baby for her while she got herself sorted out and that was really lovely, we got to cuddle baby and she was happy because she felt she got a bit of support.

What do you like about your job?

Definitely seeing all the kids come in. That’s really cool. Being with council for a few years we get to see all these kids grow up and go from having no confidence in water to having lots, or from having no skills at the rock wall to having heaps of skills and coming in to climb with a big group of friends.

We have diverse people coming in. We have travellers coming in for a shower, we have locals coming in, we get a whole variety of people and that’s really interesting.

What’s something you’d like people to know?

It’s really full on here over the holidays and to a certain degree we’re treated like a babysitting service but we always try our best to accommodate getting as many people in and letting them have a good time and a safe time if we can.

We do have our safety ratios. There’s maximum numbers of people that we can have in the pool area and so if it’s really busy we have to put up a sign and tell people that they have to wait for some people to leave before we can let them into the pools. A lot of times we get told that because we’re part of council, we’re trying to control everyone, and things like that. But we don’t set the rules, PoolSafe makes the rules and we just follow them.

Our lifeguards are great but some people have no respect for them and that’s really hard because they do a really good job.

What’s a skill you’d really like to have?

I’d really like to learn how to speak Māori because that gives me another way to interact with customers and I think it’s just really important in general. Hopefully in this next year if I can balance doing the Master’s and learning Māori that would be really good.

What’s something people don’t know about you?

I love sharks and I’m hoping to get into shark conservation for my Master’s. I want to do a thesis on the impact of people on shark numbers, which involves looking at and tagging great white sharks; and I’ve made contact with the scientist who’s running the programme up at Waihi to ask if I can be involved.