A Day in the Life of… our Customer Communications team

Whether it’s giving our residents the information they need before they arrive or sharing updates throughout their time living with Unite Students, our Customer Communications function plays a vital role in keeping students informed and engaged.

We spoke to Alex Bloor (Customer Communications Manager) and Kathleen McKeown (Customer Communications Executive) about what their typical day involves, how they keep their content relevant to students, and some of the unusual situations they’ve had to tackle in their role.

Q: Tell us what a typical day in Customer Communications involves.

Alex: We do a lot of proactive campaigns for our students – that’s our main focus. We react to a lot of things as well, like out of hours emergencies; we’ll jump on and help with things like that. We look after templates for our operations team for them to use day to day, and we analyse a lot of data from the business to then forward plan content based on what our customers want and need from us.

How do you make sure your content is really relevant to students?

Alex: We help students have a better living experience by communicating to them about the things that actually matter to them, so we don’t assume what students are feeling. We’re not Gen Z anymore, so we either just speak to them or grab the data to find out exactly what it is that they want to hear about.

Kathleen: We also signpost to tools like the wellbeing services that we have – the Wisdom app, which is available 24/7, as well as the wellbeing helpline. We try and make sure our content stays relevant by keeping in regular touch with our customer base, which is students. So we have Resident Ambassadors that we are regularly in contact with and we can just pick their brains about the topics that are most important to them.

Alex: And we keep in touch with our stakeholders that have contact with students or the data that we need about students. So our student support team, health and safety, fire safety, and obviously our field ops teams as well.

We try and also make the content a bit more relevant by framing it in a way that’s useful for Gen Z and not alarming to people. So we want to make sure that the signposting is there to wellbeing services if they need it, but we never want to convey the message that they’re going to need it. So we’ll try and promote things like: “Here’s how you can get some better sleep to help your mind,” rather than “Here’s a mental health service that you’ll probably need at some point throughout your stay.” And that’s really in line with our ‘great place to live’ objective that we’re working towards.

What are some of the more unusual situations you’ve had to deal with in your role?

Alex: We’ve dealt with quite a lot of unusual situations in our role. I think it’s part of being very varied with what we do.

Covid springs to mind – that was a pretty wild situation to begin with. I worked in operations originally when that started. We had to do a lot of comms that we’d never even thought of before, react very quickly to government updates and provide what we thought our customers needed without actually having the data to be proactive with it. So that was quite a challenge. Having that seven years’ experience in ops has helped me to prepare for all the unusual situations that we deal with in the communications world.

What’s your favourite thing about working at Unite Students?

Kathleen: It’s like a family. We’ve got a very close team that work very well together in Communications.

Alex: It’s a place where you can show your personality and you don’t have to hold back, which I quite like. And working with Gen Z is really exciting. There’s such a diverse customer base, and I like surrounding myself with that – I wish when I was at school, I’d had that diversity to surround myself with. It’s really cool to be around that all day, every day.

What has most surprised you in your time working here?

Alex: The freedom that we have to do the right thing for our residents – there’s a culture where if you’ve got a great idea for engagement and you can back that up with data and a solid good plan, you’re encouraged to run with that and you can implement some really cool things.

Kathleen: I genuinely feel as well that there’s no hierarchy, so to speak. So although you do have managers and senior managers and a formal structure, it doesn’t come across like that – you could walk past somebody in the corridor and everybody smiles and says hello to each other like you are all equal, which I think is really important.

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