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Customer Service Apprenticeship
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About the Role
This is an opportunity for an individual with a hard-working mentality. You will specialise in 1 of the following services for 1 year, allowing you time to gain an understanding of the service.
Local Welfare Provision, HGV Levy, Blue Badge Unit, Northgate Appeals Service Unit, Discount Review Service
Wage
- £15,600 for your first year, then could increase depending on your age
- National Minimum Wage rate for apprentices
- Minimum wage rates (opens in new tab)
Training Course
Customer service specialist (level 3)
Hours
- Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm (half a day college on a Thursday)
- 37 hours 30 minutes a week
Start Date
Monday 7 September 2026
Duration
1 year
Positions Available
10
What You'll Do at Work
- Maintain excellent levels of attendance and punctuality
- Attend regular training and development sessions with an assigned mentor
- Maintain excellent levels of attendance, punctuality and quality of work with Hartlepool College of Further Education
- Ensure company policies and procedures are understood and adhered to
- Work with a dedicated apprentice mentor who will support and develop you throughout your apprenticeship
- Develop telephone and administrative skills whilst dealing with a range of applicants from across Europe
- A chance to become a well-rounded member of the team with training in: telephone duties, scanning, replying to emails, uploading documents, processing payments, liaising with appellants and assisting adjudicators in minor administrative functions.
- The opportunity to provide meaningful support to the most vulnerable in society, allowing genuine gratification whilst honing your skills as a NEC SWS employee
- You will be afforded the opportunity to work alongside a diverse team of skilled advisors, presenting an exciting opportunity to learn from some of the best employees NECSWS has to offer
- You will be given the necessary training and development to distinguish yourself early in your career with NECSWS
- An opportunity to learn the fundamentals of becoming a successful employee within a large multi-national organisation
- A chance to work within and contribute to, a culture of success, driven by enthusiastic and ambitious employees
- An opportunity through hard work and commitment to move through the NECSWS Academy Scheme.
Where You'll Work
Northgate House
Lynne Street
Hartlepool
TS24 7BT
Training
Apprenticeships include time away from working for specialist training. You’ll study to gain professional knowledge and skills.
Training Provider
HARTLEPOOL COLLEGE OF FURTHER EDUCATION
Training Course
Customer service specialist (level 3)
What You'll Learn
Course Contents
- Business focused service delivery: Demonstrate a continuous improvement and future-focused approach to customer service delivery including decision making and providing recommendations or advice
- Business focused service delivery: Resolve complex issues by being able to choose from and successfully apply a wide range of approaches
- Business focused service delivery: Find solutions that meet your organisation's needs as well as the customer requirements
- Providing a positive customer experience: Through advanced questioning, listening and summarising negotiate mutually beneficial outcomes
- Providing a positive customer experience: Manage challenging and complicated situations within your level of authority and make recommendations to enable and deliver change to service or strategy
- Providing a positive customer experience: Use clear explanations, provide options and solutions to influence and help customers make choices and agree next steps
- Providing a positive customer experience: Explore and interpret the customer experience to inform and influence achieving a positive result for customer satisfaction
- Providing a positive customer experience: Demonstrate a cost-conscious mind-set when meeting customer and the business needs
- Providing a positive customer experience: Identifying where highs and lows of the customer journey produce a range of emotions in the customer
- Providing a positive customer experience: Use written and verbal communication to simplify and provide complex information in a way that supports positive customer outcome in the relevant format
- Working with customers/customer insights: Proactively gather customer feedback, through a variety of methods. Critically analyse, and evaluate the meaning, implication and facts and act upon it
- Working with customers/customer insights: Analyse your customer types, to identify or anticipate their potential needs and expectations when providing your service
- Customer Service performance: Maintain a positive relationship even when you are unable to deliver the customer’s expected outcome
- Customer Service performance: When managing referrals or escalations take into account historical interactions and challenges to determine next steps
- Service Improvement: Analyse the end to end service experience, seeking input from others where required, supporting development of solutions
- Service Improvement: Make recommendations based on your findings to enable improvement
- Service Improvement: Make recommendations and implement where possible, changes in line with new and relevant legislation, regulations and industry best practice
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Training Schedule
Reporting to the Team Lead, you will be responsible for supporting the team to deliver the necessary activities involved in the administration of these services. Full training, ongoing support and mentoring will be provided, and to develop your knowledge, there will be opportunities for you to work across our different services. Training provided will be on the job training either remotely or in the Hartlepool office with a Senior member of the team.
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Essential Qualifications
- GCSE in:
- English (grade 4 or above)
- Maths (grade 4 or above)
- Other (grade 4 or above)
- Other (grade 4 or above)
- Science (grade 4 or above)
Share if you have other relevant qualifications and industry experience. The apprenticeship can be adjusted to reflect what you already know.
Skills
- Communication skills
- IT skills
- Attention to detail
- Organisation skills
- Customer care skills
- Problem solving skills
- Administrative skills
- Logical
- Team working
- Initiative
- Non judgemental
- Patience
- Good Keyboard Skills
- Microsoft Excel and Word
- Building relationships
- People Skills
- Multi-Tasking
- Willingness to learn
Come join us and make a difference in the world! We’re NEC Software Solutions (part of global tech giant NEC Corporation). While you read this ad, our software is helping to dispatch ambulances, support families, keep trains on the move, locate missing people and even test the hearing of newborn babies. Working with us, you’ll be helping our 3,000+ employees push the boundaries of what’s possible and support amazing public services. We work with governments, hospitals, police forces, housing providers, local authorities and more. We help them pay financial support faster, speed up treatments for patients and respond to emergencies in the right way. The more we do, the more our customers can do for others. And together, we make a world of difference. We’d love your help. And we’ll support you all the way.
http://www.necsws.com (opens in new tab)
Disability Confident
A fair proportion of interviews for this apprenticeship will be offered to applicants with a disability or long-term health condition. This includes non-visible disabilities and conditions.
You can choose to be considered for an interview under the Disability Confident scheme. You’ll need to meet the essential requirements to be considered for an interview.
Your earnings can increase over time with an apprenticeship. Find out about potential future pay (opens in new tab).
Once successful completion of the apprenticeship role, this will might open future opportunities within NEC and our wide range of other services depending on various measures (role availability, performance, etc.)
The contact for this apprenticeship is:
HARTLEPOOL COLLEGE OF FURTHER EDUCATION
The reference code for this apprenticeship is VAC2000044413.
Closes in 27 days (Tuesday 25 August 2026 at 11:59pm)
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