Spotlight on... Kerry, Head of Social Media

I read up on the company and valued their ethics surrounding green energy and their high goals for customer service. The fact that they were a tech company working in the energy space excited me - no more outdated systems or waiting months (or ever) for a small update! This combined with the fact that they valued open, honest and ‘human’ conversations meant I knew I could bring my love of helping people and solving problems to the team and help be part of the change.

In a broader sense, I was a teacher in a previous life, went on to have four children and then needed to change my career to suit what I wanted out of life (being around more and not being restricted to school terms and times). I re-trained as a Social Media Manager and worked for various clients in different sectors. Octopus were fairly new when they were looking to expand their remote team to support customers outside of ‘normal’ working hours. I started working part time and then after a year (those tentacles were too strong…) I went full time and began to manage my own team of 20 amazing people in the Community Management team. I’m now Head of Social Media.

You really do get back what you give. It’s not an easy role at all but the people and the support from across the whole business is unbeatable and makes it such an enjoyable place to work. It’s not a place to work if you like stability in your role, we change fast, and often. This allows for the challenge, variety and growth that I value. I joined them looking for a ‘job’ that worked and now can’t ever see me leaving, now I have such a brilliant career.

As we build the team, we’re driven by the desire to give our customers what they want. As the business grew so did our social media following. More and more customers, or potential customers, wanted to chat to us via Facebook and Twitter. That became too much for one person to manage so we decided to build a dedicated team. We now have an ever-growing group who focus mainly on public comments while another team picks up private messages. Everybody is trained following Octopus’ successful model, where they start by learning everything they can about the energy industry. We don’t have departments, which means the Community Manager who picks up your query on Twitter will know as much as if you email or call us. They can then fix most account issues out there and then some. This means we can respond to every query that comes through really quickly.

Why are we different? Our fully dedicated, super fast team is able to help customers every day from 8am to 10pm. We read every single comment and genuinely want to help everyone that comes through to us via social media. They also have a great sense of humour!

I knew nothing about the energy industry and had never even read a meter before I joined Octopus. Being able to work for a company that wanted to make energy greener, cheaper and use tech to empower customers interested me. To have a job that makes a difference to our world, feeds my brain and is super flexible is a win win. Very quickly Octopus Energy has managed to become a part of my soul.

There are days when I manage to pick up the right tweet at the right time - I’m always impressed by how funny and clever our customers can be. You quickly start to get a feel for the ‘regulars’ and they always make coming into work every day a joy.

Another memorable day at work was when we had our Family Dinner and Former US Vice-President and Green Pioneer Al Gore sent us a personal message saying how proud he was with what we were doing. It was quite emotional and really solidified that we are really going to change the world.

The camaraderie is a joy and I feel proud of them every single day for the amount of passion they have for their role. We have a team channel where they share amazing customer feedback for each other (they do love a public shout out on Twitter) and the amount of support they give each other makes the team really precious, especially when we’re all working remotely.

I definitely still get ‘the fear’ when dealing with unreasonable/abusive people on Twitter.

When customers take the time to come back and say how much you have helped them.

No way! This is actually one of my favourite songs! "Love Is All Around" by Wet Wet Wet. Those tech guys are good...

I live near the beach in Scotland and love to paddleboard.

People using ‘bare’ instead of ‘bear’, hearing people eat, tomato sauce on macaroni cheese, leaving empty toilet roll tubes in the bathroom, walking past things at the bottom of the stairs, the size of chocolate bars nowadays, leaving lights on, lateness, partner watching the next part of a box set without you… is that enough????

Keeping my four energetic boys alive each day OR I can actually use my indicators when driving. I think it’s a rare skill nowadays.

Since having children I’ve definitely become more focused on how we can impact our environment. Looking at the changes we can make to what we use and how and being less wasteful at home is a start. In work I’m a huge advocate of using tech to help people use energy more efficiently. Helping customer to change their energy habits contributes massively to our mission of working towards a low carbon society. I love discussing this with our customers and love it even more when they come back to tell me their results. I’m so excited to see us change the world as we continue our mission globally.

Home by the sea.

The hashtag symbol (#) is technically called an octothorpe!