To commemorate the Company’s 15-year anniversary, NetRefer’s C-Level and Heads step onto the stage in a docuseries entitled ‘Walk & Talk with Team NetRefer’. We take a candid look at NetRefer’s inner workings through the eyes of the Company’s leaders.
Taking up where we left off with Dexter Cutajar’s – Head of Commercial – three-part interview, today, we’ll meet Charlie Williams – Head of Business Operations – for part 1-of-3 of his interview. We’ll be visiting the Valletta Design Cluster – a collaborative community space for cultural and creative practice. Here, Charlie will open with an overview of his division’s role and responsibility towards the company through internal services, and towards clients through external services.
Charlie, welcome, and it’s great to have you here with me today. You’re Head of Business Operations at NetRefer. Tell me, at a high level, how that team fits in the overall company structure at NetRefer and what is its role?
Absolutely. Business Operations is really the central nervous system of NetRefer. They work with the Product Delivery Team and with the Commercial Team. And they are fusing the people, the purpose and the process to ensure that we’re always delivering value across the NetRefer User Experience for all our stakeholders. This includes our employees, our clients and our partners.
Everything we’re trying to achieve during this process is really to deliver value to our clients in a clear, fair and trusted way. And the Business Operations Division is split into two functions – the internal services function and the external services function.
Drilling into that a little at this point, Internal Services, presumably, is working with the other teams inside of NetRefer. Tell me how that breaks down for Business Operations.
As you said, the Internal Services Team is providing services to our internal stakeholders. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver value to the external stakeholders, who are utilizing the Performance Marketing Platform. And that internal Services Function is split into Program Management and Insights and Analysis.
The Program Management piece is really the collection of all the various projects that we’re running in the business at any given time. We have the Business Roadmap, which is driving the initiatives that we have within the company, and we have a team of Project Managers, that are tying all the pieces of those projects together into an overall program plan.
It’s sort of monitoring at quite a high level the various components and making sure they reach their dates, deliverables, and coordinate as needed. Is it fair to say that?
Yes, definitely. We’re trying to reach that destination in collaboration, so there’s a lot of handshakes going on between the different collaborators within those projects. This means looking at the resource planning, looking at the tasks that are required, at the deliverables, the timelines, the costs and the budgets that are set. So, there are a lot of moving pieces here, and Program Management pulls that all together. And then, Insights and Analysis sits on top of that to ensure that we have the right KPIs in place.
KPIs? Can you explain that?
Yes. That stands for Key Performance Indicators. Each initiative or project that we have would have a set of KPIs tied to it. And we’re constantly monitoring those KPIs to see where we’re ending up. And before it’s too late, making the right changes – making sure that we’re proactive in the analysis we are doing.
I see. Going on to the flipside of that, you mentioned external services, which I presume would mean contact points with your clients. Tell us about that at a high level.
Yes. The External Services are also broken into two functions. We have the Solution Consultancy Function and the Experience Delivery Function. And both those functions work very closely together.
You have the Solution Consultants, which are working with the Commercial Team, so they come in during the pre-sales process. They work with the clients to ensure that business requirements are being captured correctly. Then, when a prospect becomes a client, they take that configuration and deploy it within the Performance Marketing Platform.
I presume you’ve got clients within different verticals within iGaming. You might have someone on sportsbook, and another client on the casino side, or even bingo. And I guess they would have different requirements of the platform.
Yes, absolutely. The Consultant truly understands the requirements of our clients and documenting them to ensure that the right configuration is taking place during the onboarding process.
Previously, we had an interesting conversation with Dexter Cutajar, who runs your sales operation. Tell me how your Solution Consultants liaise with his team during this process.
Typically, the Sales Function would engage one of our Solution Consultants. The Solution Consultant would step in, have a conversation with the client and our Sales Manager to ensure that we are getting the requirements correct; to ensure that we’re going to configure the Platform according to the client’s business needs.
You’ve taken all these steps in conjunction with the Sales Team and you’ve got a client ready to begin using the platform. How does that happen? Are they brought up to speed? Do they need to be educated about how this complicated system works. Talk about that briefly.
Sure. This is where the Experience Delivery Team comes in and works closely with the Consultants. So, the Experience Delivery Team handles everything around the curriculum of our Academy, our Service Desk, our Support Function
Is it fair to say that there’s a whole teaching operation here?
Yes, definitely – our whole Knowledge Base is about that, really. So, we have articles about best practices, and more. And all that information is put into our Academy. So, as the client activation is getting near to going live, we work with the clients to get them up to speed and understand how to utilize the platform in the most efficient manner.
And does that happen remotely, is that about documents, do you have interactive sessions, one-on-one with clients.
A mix of everything, really. We do have an extensive library of content on our Service Desk. And we also do a video conference, where we can walk them through the platform itself. And that’s typically the last step before they go live. And once the client is live, as part of Experience Delivery, we have our User Success Team. And this User Success Team really focuses on ensuring that, once the client has started using the platform, they are getting the results that are required. If not, or if there are any queries, then those go through that support function within Experience Delivery.
Great introduction, Charlie. Thank you.
Watch the 2nd installment of Charlie’s 3-part interview to gain deeper insight into Business Operations, Solution Consultancy, Experience Delivery and Internal Services.
A special thank you goes out to Andrew Bonello for conducting the interview.