Welcome to the Abcam blog

When most people hear of 'running' and 'Boston' they think immediately of the Boston Marathon. A grueling 26.2 mile race that takes place every April, rain or shine – a race, which only the bravest, and most well trained runners dare take on...including fellow Abcam blogger, Kimberly!

However, when we, here at Abcam put 'running' and 'Boston' together, we only draw one conclusion: the Corporate Challenge. At a mere 3.5 miles, this race took us on a tour of the Back Bay section of Boston, which we ran and walked amongst 12,000 of our closest friends.

The 26th annual Corporate Challenge took place on Thursday, June 25th, 2009. The race is a great way to get many Boston-area organizations together for a charitable cause, with the true cost only being the blood, sweat, and tears of a few thousand employees! The city-wide race encourages companies to take some time away from the daily grind for some quality team building. With pre-race events in the Boston Commons, a free shirt, and an after party; what's not to love?

We put together a strong team of eager runners this year, who were ready and willing to represent Abcam's US office. We had a variety of Molly-themed running shirts, which really got us ready for the Corporate Challenge!

Here you can see all of our smiling faces as we marched off to the race!

Taking into account just how many other participants there were in the race, it was difficult for us to stick together for the whole 3.5 miles. Fortunately we were all able to come together at the end to celebrate the completion of the race!

The Corporate Challenge is held in cities world-wide, with well over 200,000 participants running or walking for a charitable cause annually. Entry donations alone account for more than $500,000 and go to not-for-profit organizations worldwide. We are proud to say that we participated once again in this wonderful event.

My name is Jillian, and I'm a Customer Service representative in Abcam's US office. We're open around the clock...(Well, not literally, but close!)...in order to meet the needs of our customers!

In the US, we're here Monday through Friday, 8:30am until 8:00pm (EST, of course). We're even open Saturdays from 10am until 3pm! In the UK office we're open 8:00 until 17:00 GMT Monday to Friday.

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Since we're always trying to find new ways to connect with our customers here at Abcam, we thought it would a great idea to walk you through a day in the magical world of Customer Service!

9:30am

I stumble off my bike, walk up to the 3rd floor, and settle onto the exercise ball, which I use for a chair. The phones have already been on for an hour, and we've been receiving faxes since before I woke up, so I start processing the two fax orders I found waiting on my desk, while I take my first call of the day.

It's a technical call, which I was recently trained to start handling. Customer Service fields all of the technical calls, and we are trained to handle first line calls, such as questions about products that can be answered by using the datasheet. This usually includes price, availability, reactivity, tested applications, concentration, where to find Abreviews and much, much more! Feel free to check out the datasheet of your favorite product on our website to see what I mean!

If you need info on things like positive controls or you're having a problem with one of our products, then we would transfer the call so you could speak to a member of our expert Scientific Support department.

11:30am

After returning from my 15-minute break, I examine the pink origami flower I just made as I check our shared inbox. This is where we receive and distribute the inquiries and orders that customers send to us via email. We work on these throughout the day, so if you need a quick response try shooting us an email. Checking your inquiries while processing faxes and phone calls keeps us busy, and out of trouble!

As I started responding to a customer's email, a customer phoned with a few questions about her invoice so I called up one of the lovely people in our Accounts department to give them a heads-up before I transferred the call to them. We're really good at looking out for each other here at Abcam. It's just better for everyone when we keep each other informed about inquiries that affect more than one department.

2:30pm

Today is our weekly meeting, where everyone in our office (all 60 of us!) gets together for a short meeting: to touch base, and find out what's going on in each department, in our other offices. Don't worry, even during the meeting we have coverage in Customer Service and Scientific Support! This week is my turn, along with two other reps, to stay back during the meeting and cover the phones.

6:00pm

As another day comes to a close, I make sure I've completed all my work for the day before leaving my exercise ball to rest under my desk for the night. When everything seems in order, I grab my bike helmet and say "See-yah!" to the rest of our team working until 8:00pm.

So that's a day in the life of a Customer Service Rep at Abcam. We're busy little bees, but we do our best to stay on top of our game and always put our customers first.

Since our calendar and magnets have proven to be so popular we've taken it one step further and turned the US office into an art gallery. And not just any art gallery a Molly art gallery! From Monet to Van Gogh and everything in between we've got all twelve images from our illustrious 'The Fine Art of Science' calendar as stunning framed masterpieces.

Check out the difference for yourself:

Before

Dan, Marketing Coordinator and Spencer, Marketing Intern hard at work measuring.

After

Dan and Spencer proudly displaying Edvard Munch's: The Scream.

The office now has a decidedly exhibition-like feel. Although fortunately we haven't yet been charged an admission fee!

Lest you think that Abcam is based only in Cambridge, UK and that Peter is the only one writing blog posts, it's Kimberly here and I'm happy to report to you from our newly-expanded US office in Cambridge, MA!

These days phrases such as, 'Meet me at The Hotdog Stand', 'I've got The Bullpen booked for 2pm' and 'Remember our meeting last week in The Dugout?' can be heard throughout the office. No, it's not that we've decided to skip the cold Boston winter and go directly to the spring baseball season, due to the recent expansion of our office we had some new meeting rooms to name! Being Bostonians, naturally we named all of our new meeting rooms after the many sites synonymous with our favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, who play at the world-famous Fenway Park!

Our support of the team goes right down to our kitchen, named after the Cask'n Flagon: widely known as the best place to catch the game, short of getting a seat inside Fenway.

This expansion isn't all about baseball though, we now have double the antibody storage capacity so that we can keep more of your favorite antibodies on hand to get them to you faster. We also have room for almost twice as many employees (up to 92!) which means that we'll be adding more Scientific Support and Customer Service specialists to answer all of your antibody questions. It's a good thing we've got more space for new employees especially if you've taken a look at our job postings recently! And because we feel that in no way are work and play mutually exclusive, we've made a special point to include some space for our much-loved Wii and foosball table.

So next time you call Scientific Support to ask a technical question or speak with Customer Service to place an order: ask us about the score of the game and our time in The Bullpen.

The Abcam office just got even more cheery.

We're so happy with the quality of the IF images coming from our lab that we've framed them and hung them up as wall decorations! This is the first time that we've blown the IF images up to such a large size, and we're really proud with how they've turned out.

Click the thumbnails to see the full-sized images (1000x707).

	Clathrin heavy chain antibody (ab21679)
	alpha Tubulin antibody (ab18251)
	pan Cadherin antibody [mAbcam22744] - Plasma Membrane Marker (ab22744)
	UNG antibody (ab23926)