Elements of the Endorsed Advice Service

Assessment

We assess your staff's ability to advise customers in a way that meets our standard. There are two elements:

• a written assessment to demonstrate understanding of the main advice skills; process and principles; key pieces of information; and data on measures and behaviours
• a practical assessment simulating an real scenario, appropriate to your business: this might be a phone call giving advice, an in-home audit or a simulated in-store, showroom or event discussion.

Endorsement

Once all your staff have demonstrated that they are able to deliver energy-saving advice to our standard, you will receive full Energy Saving Trust endorsement, including:

• a full operations manual and certificate for each trainee
• permission to use our Endorsed by Energy Saving Trust logo on your marketing and promotional materials
• help from us to publicise your relationship with the Energy Saving Trust.

Monitoring

Our ongoing monitoring sets the Endorsed Advice Service apart: your staff and customers can be assured that the information they are receiving is always up to date and of the highest quality.

We will agree the frequency and method of monitoring with you at the outset: we’ll need a representative view of the advice provided. Monitoring may include recorded telephone calls, accompanied visits and mystery shopping as appropriate. We will also do regular audits of the processes that support your provision of advice.

Our Service Quality Assessors will send you regular feedback reports, highlighting both excellent performance and areas for improvement. We can use the reports to develop further training for you. To keep our endorsement, you must have regular successful monitoring.
We will also ask for your feedback, to make sure that you are happy with the services we provide

Continuing professional development (CPD)

We want to help advisors with our endorsement to carry on developing their skills, competencies and knowledge as the energy advice market evolves, to keep them at the forefront of the industry.

Your endorsed advisors will have access to the same professional development materials as Energy Saving Trust’s own advisors, including our new e-learning tool. Other elements include:

• coaching and training from our Service Quality Assessors after the quality monitoring
• computer-based training modules
• deeper content reading e.g. on specific energy saving measures, research, policy etc
• events, seminars and workshops
• additional Energy Saving Trust and external training courses.

Our program is certified by the independent CPD organisation, which means your staff can gain accredited learning units for the above elements.

Information support services

Our information support service saves you the time and cost of doing your own research.
We will provide a full operations manual to each trainee, including:

• training slides and notes
• advisor fact sheets
• details of key processes
• CPD materials.

We also offer ongoing support to your team so they can get all the information they need to meet your customers’ needs:

• specific enquiry support for more complex customer queries, with answers within one working week
• fact sheet updates to reflect the latest energy- saving information and statistics
• fortnightly information alerts containing new policy and media stories relevant to your customers
• early view of latest research such as technology field trials and customer insight reports
• specific content and data verification for your customer-facing collateral.

Contact us

To find out more or sign up now, contact us at endorsedadvice@est.org.uk .