Will Taylor describes his journey from being part of the makepositive Graduate Programme to becoming an Implementation Consultant
How did you find out about the makepositive graduate scheme?
It was actually my sister who brought the graduate position to my attention. As soon as I began researching the role, I was excited to find that it encompassed many of the fundamentals I had been studying at university. Whether it was digital transformation, analysing each touchpoint of a customer’s journey, or streamlining a business’s current processes, I knew immediately that applying to become an Implementation consultant was a no brainer!
After numerous interviews and an exciting assessment day in their London HQ, I accepted (without hesitation) my offer to be officially in the 2019 makepositive graduate programme. We began learning the fundamentals of Salesforce and getting acquainted with the sheer vastness and excitement of the culture that has grown around the Salesforce ecosphere.
After 3 months of extensive and exciting training, we were let loose into the consulting environment in February 2020, and have been working alongside an array of businesses in a plethora of industries to streamline their processes and build a platform that increases their productivity tenfold! Last month we completed our training as graduates and are now fully fledged Implementation Consultants at makepositive.
What have you been working on since you started at makepositive?
As a consultant, no two days are ever the same, which makes the role that even more exciting. During my time at makepositive there have been a number of projects I have been lucky enough to work on, two of which in particular I had an absolute blast working on.
The first was for a leading media and entertainment company. Here we built a solution that provided the end user with an intuitive interface that not only allowed them to retain and nurture their active customers through a seamless process, but ensure a 360 view was available to the user allowing them to provide the best customer service possible.
The projects I have been involved with span many different industries and have completely different processes, but a common similarity remains the same across the board. Clients always look for the most optimum route for their user, whether it be through visual dashboards that provide them a daily overview from a momentary glance, or the ability to communicate directly with another user or customer without deviating from their screens. As consultants we analyse the user’s journey and implement or strip back components to make their journey flow and feel intuitive. There’s nothing like seeing the excitement of customers who witness these visual changes for the first time and already begin to express how much time this will save them in the future.
What is on the horizon for you as a consultant at makepositive?
As part of our ever growing solutions within makepositive, we are enhancing our Business consulting skill set to also focus more on change management. Having studied business management in university with a particular focus on change management, this really is an exciting personal opportunity to be involved in. With the current situation across the globe, it comes as no surprise that organisations are having to adjust, pivot and transform their operations to accommodate for this. It’s an exciting time to be in a role to help create templates, frameworks and implement strategies for organisational change as this consulting style is only set to grow going forward.
With final tweaks being made to our Service Cloud Accelerator, this is going to be a game changer for industries and provide customers with what can only be described as a ‘ready made’ solution specified for their organisation’s needs. Even before workshops begin, the clients will be able to choose core modules applicable to their processes, implement the Salesforce instance, and drive it around for a few weeks to see what works best for them.. Whether it be focusing on visual interfaces that optimise the UX of the users daily tasks, having industry best practices at the forefront guiding an end users decision making, or implementing a community where an organisations customers can congregate and share their own knowledge, the service cloud accelerator will have it all right out of the box and something I am excited to be involved with. Check out our latest webinar recording to discover how you can supercharge your customer service experience with our Accelerator.
What advice would you give someone looking to apply for a similar role?
Never be afraid to go outside of your comfort zone and learn something new. It’s perfectly ok to start off from scratch at the bottom and work upwards. In the Salesforce environment, everybody wants to see you succeed and they will go out of their way to help you along that journey. As cliché as it sounds there really is “no such thing as a stupid question” and I can testify to this as I have asked many questions!
What’s your favourite thing about working at makepositive?
Hands down, for me it is the culture! Researching the role at makepositive the culture was the very first thing I picked up on, when I went to my assessment day in the London office this was only perpetuated the moment I walked through the door and I immediately knew this was the place for me! Even with 150+ people in the mp family, spanning from London, Manchester and India, whether you’re connecting face to face or via a slack call, those people are the reason why you look forward to starting working the day.
Get in touch with [email protected] to find out more about our graduate programme and how to apply.
