Spotlight on... Our Technical Customer Services Team

Spotlight on... Our Technical Customer Services Team

Our Technical Customer Services team works to ensure that our client’s insurance propositions, which are built using one of our telematics or data analytics solutions, are working correctly.

They handle, and oversee, any technical issues which may occur within our FloowDrive apps, our mobile SDK - FloowKit, or on our platform, and they are the first port of call for all technical queries sent into us from our insurance clients, and their customers.

Last year, one of our Product Owners, Andrew Oliver, was promoted to Head of Technical Customer Services and since then, he and his team have worked very hard to improve the processes and procedures surrounding customer service and dealing with technical queries and issues at The Floow.

The team now works on a weekly cadence, focusing on ensuring all open support tickets move through our service desk from investigation to resolution, keeping a regular line of communication open with the stakeholder who raised the ticket.

They work closely alongside a number of teams at The Floow, including our Client Development and Operational Engineering teams, and regularly engage with our clients to understand where we can make improvements to customer service across the organisation.

Andrew Oliver, Head of Technical Customer Services at The Floow

Meet our Head of Technical Customer Services

We spoke to Andrew Oliver, our Head of Technical Customer Services, to find out more about his past experience working in this area, the work the Technical Customer Services team have undertaken in the last 12 months, and his focus for the coming 12 months.

What’s your past experience?

After graduating in electronic engineering, I started my career in telemetry, specialising in gas and water pressure and flow monitoring, and I was heavily involved in advanced meter infrastructure (AMI). I worked for a company for a number of years and during that time, I held a number of roles across the company including designing data logging equipment and software to analyse data and provide insights to support business decisions, and technical sales where I worked across the UK, Europe and South America, spending time onsite with some of the largest utility companies in the world, to understand their challenges and design new solutions to meet their needs.

I also worked in hands-on engineering roles where I learnt coding and scripting languages, including C++, C#, and Java, HTML and Javascript. I went on to reorganise the company’s Service Desk and build a fully staffed 24/7 technical support service. From there I moved on to manage three software development teams and two IT teams, operating services from four data centres in two countries, leading a team of over 280 people across five locations.

In 2012, I experienced a life changing personal event which led to a reevaluation of what I want to do with my life. While I had been very successful in my career to date, I wanted to try my hand at something else and find a new challenge. I moved to Sheffield and got involved in the city’s tech scene, and after a few months and working on projects which brought together social workers and technologists to help homeless people find the services they need, I started to hear about the great work of The Floow. I got in touch with The Floow’s HR team and quickly joined the team.

What’s your role at The Floow?

As Head of Technical Customer Services, I control the operation of The Floow’s Service Desk, plus the development of the monitoring and control systems across the organisation. My main responsibilities focus on developing processes and procedures to ensure that technical queries which come into our Service Desk are dealt with quickly and effectively, and making sure that the procedures already in place continue to work as expected.

I work closely with our internal teams and many of our clients to understand any specific pain points with the aim of improving or eliminating these issues. I also strive to ensure that we utilise monitoring and analytics to understand where we are doing well or need to improve as a team, and to gain visibility of areas of improvement within our products, based on customer queries, which is fed back to our Product and Technical Development teams for them to investigate ways in which we can improve these areas for our clients and their customers.

Since transitioning to this role over a year ago, how have you helped to improve customer services and support at The Floow?

My first action when taking on this role was to simplify our Service Desk and place all tickets into one instance rather than splitting tickets between different instances based on location. This allows us to have a singular, holistic view of everything, and provides us with the required visibility to see all issues at once and prioritise accordingly.

I also worked to increase the collaboration and communication between this team and our clients, as well as The Floow’s Client Development teams, by establishing regular meetings where we could discuss any issues and any improvements which could be made.

I have brought the skills I developed whilst working with IBM Business Analysts, on projects for The National Grid, to The Floow focusing on documenting the Service Desk process. So far, all of this work has been well received internally, and by our clients, and I’m confident that these changes have helped to deliver the extremely positive improvements which we saw in our most recent NPS survey, undertaken at the end of 2020.

What is your focus for the future of the Technical Customer Services team? What will you be focusing on over the next 12 months?

Throughout 2021, we will be working to build improved tools which clearly show the end-user journey, from policy creation to registration and through to the creation of their first journey. This will help our Design Team to visualise the full process and make the correct and required improvements to our FloowDrive apps, and it will also assist our clients throughout the onboarding process.

How does the work which you and your team are doing impact/benefit our clients and end-users?

The Technical Customer Services team work to ensure that any issues or problems which are discovered by end-users, or our clients, are addressed promptly and professionally. As mentioned, we monitor all support tickets which are raised to find common themes or issues which can be improved within our products, and work with the appropriate teams within The Floow to get this work off the ground.

By keeping our attention on the issues that our clients, or end-users, are raising through the technical support system, we can identify any pain points in the user experience of our apps and platforms.

This information can help our development teams to make any necessary updates, or build new capabilities, which will ultimately benefit our clients and end-users by providing them with the best possible products and experience.