Assistant Manager Complaints Handling
Fidelity International

Alex D

00:00:02 My name’s Alex D. I am an Assistant Manager of a Complaints Team at Fidelity International. As Complaints Manager I’m responsible for the process of managing complaints. Which is actually, you know, a client will come to us and say I’m not happy with this, and we need to make sure that a) we follow all the right rules in responding to that, that we do it in a timely way, that we answer all of their queries and problems, and that we try and do our best to resolve an issue.

00:00:28 Working in Complaints, of course you get unhappy people calling you, but it’s one of those departments where you can get a thank you. If someone raises a complaint and you actually really deal with it, they’ve lost all hope, they think everything’s gone totally wrong, this company’s hopeless, and you really turn things around, then actually people will give you genuine thank you. They will take the time to write a letter saying thank you so much for helping us out here.

00:00:51 This is my stress ball from when things are getting a bit much in the day. Use it for playing a lot of cricket in the office. I shouldn’t say that, on film, we use these a lot, throw them at the Manager. It has stressful moments, there’s – I mean there are times in Complaints when you’ll get people screaming down the phone at you, and you think God, this is – this is stressful. And then you can play with the ball.

00:01:11 I got into Complaints sort of over a sort of a period of time. I came to work for Fidelity straight from University and that was – it was almost just kind of leave University and get a job. I moved around a bit internally, I’ve worked in a few departments. One day I got a phone call from the then Manager of the Complains Team who said Oh you know, we’ve got a job opening, we think that you’d be really good for it, why don’t you come along? So I said yeah, OK, I’ll come over and interview for that, and sort of been here ever since really.

00:01:43 I think – I mean when I was a 5 year-old I think that I saw everything much more black and white, you know, there were only four jobs. There was being a doctor, there was being a teacher, being a lawyer, or being a train driver. I knew I wanted to be a lawyer from when I was about 17. And looking around then at kind of University courses, I saw this course called Chemistry and Law – which was a degree in Chemistry and a degree in Law. And thought, well that looks really, really interesting.

00:02:08 I left University, and when I left University I still thought – well I want to be a lawyer. And in order to sort of carry on down that route, I got a job. And at first it was quite a simple job, and it wasn’t – wasn’t a job I was going to carry on with for a very long time. And in fact haven’t. But what I did then was look around the company I was in from that first job, and then see all the things that they advertised internally. So probably I didn’t realise that I was going to end up where I am now, until I was 21, 22.

00:02:37 The things that I’m sort of proudest of are the things I’ve down outside work. I mean I ride bikes, I like riding bikes, and I do that for sort of – for charities, I’ve raised a lot of money. I did an amazing thing that was called Jail Break, where you were given 36 hours to get as far away from where you were, without spending any money at all. And it started in Bristol, at the Students’ Union there. And 36 hours later I was sipping a beer in Brussels thinking yeah, I’ve done pretty well there. I have to say, we didn’t win. The winners got to Arizona, so I don’t know how they managed that. But we raised a lot of money, and it was a lot of fun.

00:03:10 Certainly when you’re quite young, you almost sell you life to your job. You do very long hours, you don’t have the time to go out with your friends, to meet your girlfriend, to do these things, and I thought – I’d like to do a job that is – it’s professional, it’s kind of career driven, there’s a career path, but that I’ve got time to do the things I enjoy. And I look at myself in a few years’ time and I think I’d like to be kind of, you know, in a senior position within the company, you know, but still have – still have a life.

00:03:40 Be willing to have a go, you know, if someone says – I think you’d be good at this – it may not be what you originally wanted to do, but maybe it’s something worth having a go at. And if you do that, and you enjoy it, then actually you’ve got to the stage where you probably wouldn’t have got to if you’d just gone – I am going to be a lawyer. And you stay on that course unwaveringly. So I think that, you know, if somebody says you might be good at this – then why not listen to them? Why not have a go?

ENDS