At the start of January, we asked you to provide feedback to help make Extra People even better in 2024.
Over 1300 of you took the time to complete the survey. It took a while to digest it all, but needless to say your feedback was incredibly insightful and helpful.
Firstly, we were very proud and relieved to receive an average rating of 8.1/10.
This shows that we’re on the right track but there’s room for improvement.
What you praised us for
Many of your comments featured the recurring themes listed below.
Our Communication
Overwhelmingly, this was the most popular answer. The consensus is that our Availability Enquiries are well written and detailed, with little fluff or exaggeration. Our communication and support is professional, rapid and helpful.
Our Booking Process
People find our booking process reliable, consistent and easy to understand. Our organisation and efficiency were praised, making you feel that you were in a safe pair of hands.
The Quality of our Jobs
We were praised for working on plenty of prestigious, top-tier Film & TV productions.
The Frequency of Availability Enquiries
There’s a consensus that we send plenty of enquiries for a wide range of jobs.
The Reliability and Speed of Payments
With top-tier productions comes the assurance that industry rate cards will be followed and our payment system is considered swift and reliable.
The Friendliness of our Team
Reading your lovely comments was a big morale boost in the office!
The Usefulness of the Advice Centre and the Blogs
People enjoy our blogs and find the outreach helpful and worthwhile.
Here’s where we can improve
As expected, criticisms were more insightful than praise since they revealed our blindspots and weaknesses.
Faster Releases and Confirmations
This was the most common frustration. People just want to able to plan their lives and some mentioned that if three days go by after the enquiry without any answer, they often forget about it or assume the opportunity has passed. Slow confirmations increase chances of double-booking and diary conflicts.
It’s important to state that this isn’t something we can control. Productions vary in their casting processes and it’s unavoidable that we’ll be working on a few jobs every year that are slow to give us their selections.
However, to help counter this, we’ll be pressuring productions to give answers much sooner. Your feedback has given us the ammunition to compel productions to give selections faster.
Just a reminder that Availability Enquiries are not binding and that if you ever become unavailable for a role, a simple email to team@extra-people.com that includes the production name and the relevant dates is all that’s needed. We discuss how you should approach availabilities enquiries in-depth in this blog here.
Clearer understanding of who is managing which production.
It’s much better to receive enquires and emails signed off by an actual person, rather than “The Extra People Team”. Knowing which employee is sending what email helps improve support and helps build working relationships with specific people.
We’ve already started to incorporate this across all communication and the difference is noticeable! We trust that this won’t be abused - please don’t bombard the booker all the time for updates and job opportunities. As soon as we have any, we’ll be in touch.
Always Specify Location - A big industry grumble!
This is probably the most common grievance in the SA community; people hate being given a general location, such as “London”, “Liverpool” or “Manchester”. Some SAs decline enquiries out of principle if the location is too vague.
We’ve tackled this previously and feel like our team are pretty good at avoiding it, but we’ve recommitted to pressing production for more details when they give us too broad a location. Even “North/East/South/West London” is better than just “London”. As soon as we know the borough, town, post code etc, we’ll pass it on immediately. Trust us, we also find it baffling how productions can not know the filming location until the day or two before the shoot, but it happens.
We won’t wait until we have the call-times to pass on the exact crowd base postcode to booked artists, and the overwhelming popularity of ‘What 3 Words’ (W3W) means that it’ll become a mainstay in our Check-In messages. If you haven’t downloaded the W3W app to your phone yet, we recommend you do so. Some crowd bases are really out in the sticks.
Improve the accessibility and presence over the phone.
Currently we encourage people to only use the office phone number for emergencies or when they’re having difficulties. There are times when the phone rings so much that we cannot get on with our jobs. Due to our size, the sheer volume of calls into our office is something you’ll only understand if you experience it.
However, we’re committed to evolving our communication methods and preventing our voicemails from building up. (Side note: try not to ramble in your voicemail since long recordings clogs up our storage very quickly!). Please appreciate that as much as we’d love to natter with every person on our books, there simply isn’t the time in the day.
Because of our size and the productions that we work with, we are unable to adopt the booking process of smaller agencies that operate almost entirely over the phone. The bulk of your booking communication will always be through texts and emails, but we like to phone you if we need to chase you or inform you of sudden changes.
The work phone of the booker is provided in the Check-In messages before each filming day and if you know exactly who you need to contact, our Team page lists the contacts of each booker.
Acknowledge emails when we’ve read and actioned them.
Sometimes our days are so hectic that we can’t respond to every single email but rest assured, last year we introduced a new email management system that has improved our response rate infinitely. We’re already much better at flagging once the issue is concluded.
Promote Newcomers so people can land their first job faster.
We’re aware that some people have to wait several months before landing their first job after joining our books, which is frustrating because it’s often your first job that triggers a positive feedback loop of enquiries and bookings.
We’ve adopted a new workflow that encourages our bookers to approach those who haven’t worked yet more often and identify those that have done SA work previously through other background agencies.
For every experienced Supporting Artiste complaining about newbies, we have a newbie complaining that they can’t get their foot in the door! We’ve introduced an online learning module to ensure fresh faces are familiar with what’s expected of them on their first job.
Have Extra People representatives be physically present on jobs.
In the vein or becoming more personable, we know how impactful it is to put a face to a name. We’ll be working closer with each production to have the Extra People booker be present in crowd holding a few times throughout the shooting schedule.
Even for the more negative questions, the responses were overwhelmingly kind and well-written. We really appreciated the professionalism of your feedback. Your comments inspired plenty of ideas that we are still fleshing out and the blog ideas were also useful; many of your desired topics will be covered over the coming weeks.
Equally, we realised that this survey was likely the first time a background agency had requested in-depth feedback from supporting artists and as such many people took the opportunity to detail many frustrations and complaints about the entire industry.
While not every issue was necessarily relevant to Extra People per se, they were nonetheless illuminating and proved that there are plenty of areas that demand improvement from the agencies, the unions and the producers.
We encourage all our artists to join a union if they haven’t already, since collective power is the strongest tool for improving the rates and conditions agreed upon by the productions:
Join your union.
BECTU - for London and the South East.
EQUITY - for outside London and the South East.
Speaking of, both the Equity and FAA rates have improved from 1st January 2024.
🎉🥳 The winner of the £50 Amazon Voucher was Felicity from Hemel Hampstead 🥳🎉
Each artiste who submitted their name into the draw was assigned a number and we used an online random number generator to pick someone at random.
Support Contacts
The email address to use for any profile-related issue is epcommunity@extra-people.com
To chase outstanding payments for work from over 8 weeks ago, please contact ukartistsupport@ep.com
If you have any booking enquiries please reply to the last email concerning that project. Your email will go to a dedicated email for that production.
If you have general enquiries that are not pay or booking related, please contact team@extra-people.com
On Facebook and Instagram, we post Urgent Casting shout-outs and let you know
when the productions you’ve worked on are released. Follow us to stay informed!