Graduate Glenn Hicks tells us more about his Customer Insight graduate role
Glenn Hicks
Hi,
I’m Glenn, currently on the Customer Insight graduate scheme within British Gas and I thought I’d drop by to tell you a bit more about what this graduate in particular, gets up to at work! My job title is “Data Strategy and Change Business Analyst” – does that sound a bit confusing? I’ll try and explain my role in slightly plainer English…
There are two main parts to my role and neither are what you might expect for someone in customer insight – in fact I’m not doing anything to do with analysis at all!
The first part of my role is managing the change process for insight – because British Gas is such a big company, we have a centralised process for change, whether that’s a big change like revamping our customer database, or something smaller like fixing a page on the website. So I manage this for the customer insight department – briefing change requestors on what the process is, helping them to prepare their documentation and making sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.
It’s taken a long time to understand the process myself (and I’m not sure I’m 100% there yet) but I’m really enjoying this aspect of my role because it involves a lot of negotiation and stakeholder management (i.e. keeping change requestors happy). These are both skills I developed slightly at university through my involvement in societies (Enactus in particular), but they’re both big areas I want to develop so I’ve found it really useful that I have this role in my first placement.
The second part of my role is helping to facilitate the data strategy programme, which is a big change programme which aims to build a new customer database. I know this doesn’t sound too exciting but doing this will actually enable insight to do some pretty amazing things in future to drive the business forward. For example, our engineers will get a full view of a customer’s product and contact history before visiting them, allowing them to tailor their approach and deliver the best service possible.
So far I’ve been involved in key meetings with senior stakeholders, I’ve designed a communications plan and next week I’m organising an event for the 60+ people working on the programme – which I’m really excited about! Though I’m even more excited that tomorrow I’m separately meeting the Commercial, Finance and Managing Directors of British Gas to get their thoughts on the programme – which is a great opportunity to learn from senior people and to gain visibility!
Overall I’m really enjoying the scheme at the moment, I feel like I’m actually adding value to my team and I get on really well with my manager! My next role is likely to be more analytical to make sure I keep challenging myself, and while I did a bit of analytics in my degree I pretty much know nothing about the kind of tools and methods they use in insight – so don’t worry if you don’t either, it’s all an opportunity for you to learn new things and develop your skills!
Glenn