UBC’s Sentinel House on Ancells Business Park in Fleet has scooped the Customer Service Excellence awards at a prestigious industry event.

FlexSA (the Flexible Space Association) relaunched the long-running awards programme in 2021 having postponed last year’s event due to ongoing restrictions and lockdown measures at the time.

The new-look 2021 awards introduced regional categories and attracted a huge number of nominations from workspaces all over the country. The awards programme has become increasingly competitive as the flexible workspace industry has grown and diversified within the UK.

UBC entered all seven of its regional workspace locations and against incredibly tough competition, was thrilled to see 5 centres including UBC’s Fleet and Cirencester offices become finalists with Sentinel House in Fleet the outright winner in the South and South West region.

Kevin Barker Thomson and Danielle Osborne represented the company at the award ceremony in Bristol.

The company said: “The community spirit created by Kevin and Dani was commended. They have run a variety of events for customers, focussing on smaller but more frequent activities to boost morale. They organised an ice cream van and a mobile coffee franchise to visit. Twelve new clients with a total of 95 staff have been welcomed at the centre so far in 2021.”

It is the fourth consecutive year that UBC has accomplished the top spot at the Flexible Workspace Awards, having won awards in 2019 (Rutherford House, Birchwood), 2018 (Enterprise House, Southampton) and 2017 (UBC Cirencester).

Managing director Richard Johnson said: “UBC has long focused on creating positive, supportive communities at each of its locations; to have this recognised by our industry peers with these awards for Customer Service Excellence and knowing that the awards are based on feedback from our customers is really special. The result is especially meaningful following the unprecedented challenges that our centre teams have faced throughout the pandemic.”

Staff worked hard and adapted quickly to the difficult conditions they were met with in 2020. Going ‘above and beyond’ became a matter of course, as staff constantly found new ways to help their clients in need. Some examples included helping clients fill out emergency loan applications, sorting and forwarding mail to their homes during lockdown, contacting clients individually when they were unable to reach the office, and putting together ‘welcome packs’ when clients returned to the office. There are many more thoughtful examples too numerous to mention, and it is moments like these that have been reflected in the team’s award success.

Jane Erasmus, sales and marketing director, said: "Supporting our customers is at the heart of everything we do. Engaging with customers and listening to what is important to them is key to our future success and that’s why we are working on making it easier for customers to access our services online and enhancing the flexibility of our service offering to incorporate more options for those customers who have chosen to embrace hybrid working patterns.

“Moving forward, we look forward to continuing to support every one of our customers over the coming months and years, who are in very good hands with our award-winning teams.”