On National Apprenticeship Week 23-year-old Megan Duggan, our Customer Involvement Officer for South and Central regions of England, explains how studying a Digital Marketing course is helping her to engage with tenants more effectively.

As Customer Involvement Officer, part of my role is to give customers the tools and knowledge to have their say about our services, and in order to do that I help organise focus groups, arrange events and customer training sessions. I also work closely with the Riverside Customer Voice Executive (the national customer representative group), and I’m now helping them to raise their profile on social media, focusing on Facebook and Twitter as well as working with customers in the community.

In November I started studying the Level 3 apprenticeship in Digital Marketing, which is 18 months long so I’ll finish in May 2020. The course is very comprehensive, and it really helps that the workshops and seminars are online which makes it easy for me to fit around my workload. I have regular catch ups over the phone with my tutor, who is very motivating and encouraging.

I would highly recommend this course to anyone interested in digital marketing. It is a brilliant opportunity for people to increase their personal development, and I feel it’s already made me better at my job.

I am more courageous in my role and willing to take risks now that I’m harnessed with the new knowledge and skills I have gained so far. Soon I will be setting up and looking after an Instagram account for Riverside Customer Voice so I can increase online following and produce more engaging and innovative content. Setting up the Instagram account will make our involvement opportunities more appealing to younger tenants.

This is one of many ideas I have gained the confidence to pitch to the rest of my team to improve social media content. We have already had our first Facebook Live event, which allowed us to video stream live to customers situated all over the country. Without doing this course I wouldn’t have been able to engage with our customers in this way through more creative means.

Another project I am working on is called the Digital Champions programme where we are looking at how our customers can become more digitally engaged by being able to get online to access their accounts and book repairs.

Thanks to this professional development opportunity to study the Digital Marketing course, I have the foundations to build and help me produce an effective campaign so that customers benefit from it.

My aim is to increase the Riverside Customer Voice social media following and that our customers who weren’t signed up to our online services are connected through successful and engaging campaigns.