Every month we recognise colleagues who reach long service milestones with "Better Everyday" awards at Vanquis.
As a throwback, we caught up with Neil (Talent Acquisition Partner) who has recently celebrated 16 years with us! Here he shares his career story from Customer Service Agent and the why he still loves working here after all this time.
Tell us about your career journey at Vanquis…
I started back in 2004 as a Customer Service Agent helping our customers with their queries over the phone. After 6 months I was lucky enough to get a role within our HR Team as the HR Administrator. 16 years and many moves within the HR Team later I now lead the team responsible for recruiting into our Operations Teams.
What stands out as your first impressions of Vanquis?
I loved it. I’d never worked somewhere before where you had a proper induction with full training on how to do your job, it was just great. Also the people were great, there were only 4 in my induction group so we got to know each other pretty well but we also got to know nearly everyone else in the Bank quite quickly too. It was much easier to know everyone back then though, there were only about 100 of us!
What is/are the biggest differences between then and now?
I would have to say how we service our customers. The technology and tools we have available to help our customers is light years ahead of what it was when I started. What’s really exciting though is knowing that we’ve not stopped. If anything we want to be able to do even more for our customers.
What’s made you stay here for 16 years?
Doing interviews I get asked this question a lot and the answer hasn’t changed in the past 16 years… it’s the people. I love my team; we all work really hard and get on so well but wider than that throughout the business everyone is friendly and approachable. We’ve grown loads and now have 3 sites across the country but what’s brilliant is that we’ve not lost that community feel.
How have you made a difference in your time here?
I’d like to think that the biggest difference me and my team have made is the opportunity we give to our colleagues. I’ll always champion internal progression and promotions and it’s so satisfying to see someone who we recruited into one of our Agent roles moving on and progressing their career with us.
Thanks Neil - here's to many more years!
