With its booming economy and huge growth in the building industry, WA is an exciting place for insurance companies. One company making the most of the opportunities is SGIO. Since 2003, the West Perth branch has trebled in size to become the largest call centre in the Insurance Australia Group (IAG) network. One of the most valued cogs in their business wheel is Direct Sales Manager Amanda Whiting.

Amanda was recruited in 2003 to manage the fast growth of the SGIO branch. Since then the call centre has grown from 70 staff to 220, and they are now selling for five different brands across Australia.

Applying Life’s Lessons

It’s a long way from the mining town of Southern Cross to a high rise office in West Perth, but Amanda says her most important lesson about sales was learnt while running a hospitality business with her husband in Southern Cross.

“Running the motel was about knowing your customer. We were relying on the customer to feed our family so we couldn’t lose any customers! We had to do different things to attract corporate clients, identifying who we could have as customers and then pitching to them about what we could deliver them.”

The philosophy of knowing your customer is ingrained for Amanda, who makes time to sit on the phones at SGIO and insists on meeting with customers who have complaints.

“Talking to the customer is a really important priority; otherwise, you don’t know what your business is doing. In large organisations senior managers can get quite removed from customers.”

She describes the three-year stint as motel manager as an incredible learning experience. “It was 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no break. What I’ve learnt from it is that you can be a generalist; you can know enough about each thing to do a good job.”

When it comes to people management Amanda stresses the importance of knowing your people.

“You can’t assume that you can put management principles in place unless you understand what is happening in a person’s life. People talk about motivation all the time, but it’s actually about what’s important to this person at this time.”

	At IAG we practice getting to know people and treating them like individuals – which is what they are.

“The most important thing for a people manager is that they know their people and put context around anything that they’re doing. When we’re managing change we really have to explain the ‘why’ so they can cope with the ‘what’. If you put some context around stuff, people are more than happy to support you and support the organisation.”

It’s all about having a good conversation

Sitting at her desk in a corner of the call centre, Amanda brings a very human element to discussions about sales and call centres. She keeps coming back to the importance of having good conversations.

“Everything that I deal with is about having a really good conversation – if it’s a stakeholder, if it's staff, or a customer. It’s about being able to sit down and say: ‘ok, what do you want out of this and how can we come to some sort of agreement?’”

“That principle has followed me all through my life. Whenever something’s been really bad, providing it’s people-related, if you just go on talking to someone you can sort it out. It’s pretty simple really, but we always forget and get carried away with emotion.”

Call Centre Culture

Amanda’s ability to transfer life’s lessons to her managerial role has paid great dividends for the call centre. Last year the West Perth centre won the Teleservices Centre of the Year award at the state Australian Teleservice Association’s (ATA) awards. Team Leader of the Year and Teleservices Champion of the year also came from West Perth.