Joran Rackstraw

Equans are an international Facilities Management service corporation. Having previously worked in SME business' I wanted to prove my abilities in a corporate environment.

The role of Network Manager in the electric vehicle division appealed to me based upon experience in managing networks at Bistech.

In the short time I have been here I have made huge impact in a number of areas, and am continually assessing where continual improvements can be made.

• By building supplier relationships and improving process' the charging network utilisation increased from 63% to 85% in 6 months, a figure that had not been above 70% since 2020.
• Improved invoicing process resulting in over £10k in invoice revenue per month, and over £90k in annual costs.
• Integral in the rollout of a new hosted telephony platform.
• Project managed reconfiguring of CRM platform, by simplifying user interface, resulting in improved user experience and reporting for customer related performance.
• In recognition of the improvements made I received an interim bonus.

I joined Kortext at a time of growth, due to the pandemic, which had created huge uptake in blended learning. Kortext had to grow from a small business to an enterprise organisation, without going through scale-up steps.

Tasked with improving and automating existing manual processes to ensure improved customer delivery, thereby customer satisfaction and retention. This was achieved in process mapping sessions involving multi-functional stakeholders across departments, to deliver the improvements and cross functional training.

Due to the improvements made, the Customer Services headcount was reduced from 34 to 18 employees, resulting in savings of over £250k. As an advocate for internal promotion 9 of these Customer Success staff were promoted to skills suited roles within Kortext,

• Reporting directly to C-Suite.
• Improvement in customer delivery from an average of 14 days to under 3 working days.
• 100% Customer retention year on year
• Member of Senior Management team helping the business triple in turnover from £7m to £21m
• Implemented NPS and Customer satisfaction surveys
• Responsible for producing management reports for board review
• Product owner of internal management application, integral in improving digital transformation
• Involved in multiple successful tender bids, resulting in securing long-term contracts with universities
• Introduced public-facing Knowledge Base, writing articles for user self-help

• Promoted from Business Development Manager, Techincal Account Manager to Head of Service due to success in this role
• Ability to present technology in a language that is understood by all levels of user, maintainer, and manager
• Achieved consistent positive feedback from customers and over 95% customer retention year on year
• Focused on staff retention and career development by recognising and encouraging individual strengths, thereby improving morale and reducing churn
• Managed team budgets including asset, training and wage, maintaining year on year within budget
• Performance managed, including 1-2-1 meetings, with a team comprising 8 office-based and 7 remote/field technicians; including resource planning and ongoing training (internal and manufacturer)
• Recruited and trained talented staff who could understand the supported solutions and enjoy healthy debates
• Introduced ‘soft skills' training to improve the communication and work ethic of the team
• Improved engineer route planning by integrating TomTom satnav with Google maps and MicrosoftCRM
• Involved in strategic and operational decisions as part of the senior management team
• Project management of over 100 voice & data solutions for many business verticals including retail (The White Company), motor (Snows Motor Group, Perrys Motor Group), health (NHS), logistics (Wyvern Cargo)
• Produced and presented operational performance KPI's in board meeting
• Operational knowledge of implementing processes that comply with ISO9001(2015), ISO27001(2013), and BS10012(GDPR)
• Following ITSM methodology implemented and documented operational business improvement by monitoring trends and root cause analysis