The people person
When it comes to people, Natalee knows a thing or two about what makes them tick.She spoke to us about her role and how she builds great relationships with customers;
Most weekends are pretty busy, running around looking after horses and watching my boys go down big cliffs and over great big obstacles on two wheels, we’re a pretty busy and active family.
I'm home-based, but I spend most of my time travelling around to see my customers that are based all over the UK. My official role is Head of Solutions Consulting, which means I manage a team of eight Presales and Solutions Consultants.
Our primary role is to understand our customers' needs, challenges and issues, and then we build a technology strategy around that to make life easier for their customers to do business with them.
I spend most of my time talking to people to understand what their individual challenges, goals and needs are, and then I look at the technology, processes, or methodology that can help address those needs.
I like to help our customers enable their vision. Every customer will have a vision and a goal as to where they want to get to, and I like to think that's where we add the biggest value. We take them on a journey and we build confidence and trust along the way, so they're able to realise that vision.
What I love about my role is that we go across every single vertical that there is. So, whether that's retail, finance, insurance, travel, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing or engineering.
We touch every single vertical and then also against public and private sector, so all the local government as well. I don't think there's any other job where you get the experience and the insight across all those different verticals.
Sure, there are challenges along the way, there are lots of things that I have to do and pull together, that I'm often reliant on other vendors, other parties, other individuals, and that's probably the biggest challenge for me, is trying to facilitate all of these different processes, vendors, people, to get something back to the customer in a timely fashion.
When you start looking at insurance and finance markets, they're very heavily regulated, so compliance is a real driving force for those guys.
For us, from a contact centre perspective it's the same challenges, they're all trying to deliver a better level of service, increased customer satisfaction and drive a more efficient and effective workforce.
For me, it's all about becoming very emotionally connected to my customers, so I build very strong relationships within all of the accounts, and that's very much based on personal relationships.
I like to understand what's important for those individuals, what makes them tick. I like to get to know them not only on a professional perspective, but also a personal level, and I think that really helps us build a better relationship.
I absolutely love the fact that we have the opportunity of getting into the different verticals and understanding how all those different businesses work.
I spend a lot of time listening to agents, sitting next to them, listening to the customer interactions that they have, understanding the experience that they're giving their customers, and that's the bit that I find the most interesting.
From a personal perspective, as I said, it's about being emotionally connected to our customers, and being able to help provide the best choices for them.
Because, like I say, I understand their organisations and I'm able to be able to address their specific personal needs and make it very tailored and specific to them.
I don't want our customers to want to go anywhere else, so retaining those customers is key. If there's a new requirement, I want them to use us as the first port of call, I would like to think that they would come to us first before going out to market, it’s about building those longer term relationships, and building a loyal customer base.
So at the moment there are a number of single touch points into our accounts, so you've got the typical sales manager and then the pre-sales lead.
What we're trying to do, is extend those relationships from outside of that, bringing in some of the support personnel and the project teams, so that we align the different relationships across the accounts.
For me it is really important we make sure we've got the right personalities within each of the accounts. When you start aligning the personalities and the interest, you build a much better rapport within an organisation, you can empathise, and you can relate to them, which helps strengthen those relationships.
Ultimately, people buy from people, and I think within Capita and particularly in my world, we have a fantastic team of individuals with real diverse skill sets and personalities, that's what keeps me wanting to come to work every day, it’s the team of people I've got around me.
I've been here 11 years now, and I've had many an opportunity to leave, and the thing that has always kept me here is the people, and I can't emphasize how important that is, I think people are the biggest asset within any organisation, and that's what makes this business good and successful.
People that know me, and I guess the reputation that I always wanted to have, is that I'm seen as friendly, proactive, personal, easy to deal with and very much a trusted individual.
I want people to know that I really care about what I do, I care about the people that are around me, and I care about our customers. So, this year, my New Year's Resolution was to surround myself with positive thinking people because I absolutely feel that positivity breeds positivity.