Spotlight on… Emma Cridland

Tell us a bit about your career and what brought you to CheckFire.

After being made redundant from a customer service role, I was taken on at CheckFire in a temporary, 2-week position. 2 years later; I’m still here.

What is your role at CheckFire and which service do you provide?

I’m the newly appointed customer service team leader, overlooking my team to ensure they provide 100% customer service. I’m highly passionate about the position and thoroughly enjoy working with everyone in my team.

Talk us through a typical day in your role.

Ensuring any customer issues are dealt with in a timely manner and that my team are going above and beyond for our customers.

What advice would you give to landlords, property owners or business owners when it comes to ensuring the right fire safety measures are in place?

Whilst I’ve always respected the importance of fire safety, since working for CheckFire and understanding fire safety in much more detail, it’s quite scary to see how quickly a disaster can strike if the correct measures aren’t implemented and maintained. My advice would be to never underestimate the importance of understanding where their responsibilities lie with fire safety.

Which of CheckFire’s products are you most excited about at the minute?

Our ability to turn our attention to protecting people from the pandemic really excited me and was something we’re all very proud of. Keeping people safe from fire is at our very core, and adapting to support businesses at a time of incredible uncertainty was very rewarding. As a result, I am most excited about the Rapid-10 Sanitiser, which was designed to help businesses get back to work.

What has been your most memorable moment with CheckFire?

Coming together and working through the lockdowns to ensure our customers are catered for. Throughout the pandemic, we appreciated the pressure, challenges and stress that our customers were up against and wanted to support them in any way we could. Our ability to offer customers non-fire safety support allowed us to help many businesses through this awful time.

Why is your job so satisfying?

Going home knowing I have provided customer service to the best to my ability.

In which direction do you think the fire safety industry is headed?

I think it is going to be busier as restrictions are lifted and more places are re-opening. Fire safety is definitely getting more focus and attention put on it, and rightly so. While we don’t typically imagine experiencing fire disasters in our lifetime, they do happen and we all need to ensure the right fire safety measures are put in place. As we start to plan for life out of lockdown, we foresee a surge in activity as more places reopen. Although we understand reopening businesses and establishments is vital, fire safety is very much part of the initial planning stages of reopening and needs to be a priority.