Ahead of Valentine’s Day, we sat down with our colleague Nicola Kent based at our Leeds depot to learn all about working together with her husband Craig, how they first met and their time at Yodel.
Q: When did you both join Yodel?
Nicola: I joined Yodel back in September 2002. I started out as a depot worker and moved into an office-based role after two years. Craig started in November 2008 initially based in Sheffield. Shortly afterwards, he moved to the same depot here at Leeds.
Q: What are your roles here at Yodel?
Nicola: I work in Customer Service Support on the morning shift, which involves booking the drivers out and making sure they have all their deliveries and collections for that day that are due. We also help support with any address or label issues. I also deal with costing for the depot and wages, andto check the systems for customer queries and check through the driver delivery photos.
Craig has been a delivery driver since he joined.
Q: How long have you been together and when did the relationship start?
Nicola: We’ve been together for 11 years, and married for more than 8 years. We don’t have any children together but have four beautiful children between us. I say kids, but three of them are adults themselves now (23, 22, 20 and 14). We have a wonderful dog called Tilly and we’ve had her for five years and class her as our little baby!
Craig originally lived in Sheffield but moved in with me after more than a year together and we now live in Morley which is only a mile or so away from the depot.
Craig made the first move by messaging me to see if I fancied going out for a drinkand thought ‘why not? A drink won’t do any harm’, and here we are nearly 12 years later.
We used to talk in general at work about family life and I liked the fact Craig was a hands-on dad. He always put his children first.
Q: What is it like working together?
Nicola: It’s great, but it’s not all plain sailing as you can imagine. We talk a lot about work and I like to switch off when I’m not on the job, so we pursue other interests that we both enjoy to take our mind off things. We both love working for Yodel, but having family time and spending time together at home is important to us.
Craig is passionate about his job. He likes to be out there meeting people and he knows his regular customers and has great relationships with them. For me, I like the fact a lot us who work here have been here years and we’re like a family. I also like the banter with the drivers and the relationship we all have.
I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. At Leeds we’ve introduced more self-employed drivers and the systems we have in place are best in class technology out there.
As part of our Have Your Say survey, where we gain valuable customer insight ahead of key events, we learnt that…
- 72% of customers planned on purchasing a Valentine’s Gift for a romantic partner
- 37% of customers planned to purchase new items from online marketplaces
- 26% of customer who planned on purchasing a pre-loved gift did so because it is more environmentally friendly
The next time you have a Yodel delivery, why not take part in our Have Your Say survey. You could even win £200 through our prize draw. Learn more here: https://www.yodel.co.uk/about/have-your-say-dashboards