As we celebrate our 50th Anniversary, we are taking this opportunity to spotlight the people who have been instrumental in our journey.
In the third of our series of interviews, we introduce Patricia Simpson, another valued member of the DRAMS family.
Following William’s insights into the innovation behind DRAMS’ development team, we turn our focus to the heart of our customer relationships: Patricia Simpson, one of the key members of our Customer Care team.
While Chris brought us insights from over four decades at DRAMS, Pat offers a fresher perspective from her eight years in our Customer Care team.
Through Pat’s story, we explore the critical role of customer care and the dedication it takes to ensure our clients receive exceptional support, no matter where they are in the world.
1. Can you introduce yourself, share some details of your experiences?
So, I’m Patricia Simpson, and I work in the Customer Care team at DRAMS. I’ve been with DRAMS for eight years, and I’ve worked in the customer care team for all that time.
Before that I worked for an oil company, as a third-party contractor for an IT supply company. I was there for four years working on their service desk. Prior to that I worked at John Lewis in Aberdeen.
2. What is your favourite drink?
I’m more of a soft drinks person. If I’m honest – I don’t really like spirits. I don’t really like the taste of it at all.
However, when I was out in Trinidad last year visiting one of our customers, I discovered that I like rum. I don’t think I’d ever tried it before that trip.
So, to answer I’m going to say rum…rum and coke to be quite specific.
3. What is the most enjoyable aspect of your current role at DRAMS?
Basically, the answer is in the title. Its our customers – I like working with them and I like speaking with them on a daily basis.
I enjoy the fact that just by me doing my job I can make their lives easier and that I can help them however and whenever I can.
It’s a really good feeling to know that by me spending time speaking to them and getting to know them, I can help them do what they need to do to make their jobs better.
4. How has your role at DRAMS evolved since you first joined, and what would you consider to have been some of your key learning experiences?
In terms of my role, the actual role itself, probably hasn’t changed a great deal over the years. For me, what I see as having changed over the years, is that the day I started, I knew nothing!
I knew very little about the spirits industry and obviously nothing about the DRAMS products and services whatsoever. And so, the biggest changes have been with me changing and evolving as I learn about the spirits industry, getting to know more about what our customers do and how they do it.
I’m always learning more and more about how our customers processes work and what that means for the DRAMS solutions. And every time I learn something more, I’m able to bring that back into the conversations I have with our customers and the way I approach my role here.
So yeah, rather than just saying the role has changed, it’s definitely more about how I’ve evolved in my time at DRAMS and how I’ve changed in my role because of that.
On a bigger level, if I was to think back on how the company has evolved and how that has impacted the way I do my job, it all comes down to how much we’ve grown!
When I first started, there were just 3 or 4 people in Customer Care, there were three developers; then there was Graham doing all the implementations and Brendan leading the company.
So we’ve gone from 8 or so people to where we’ve more than doubled in size today.
With the growth in people and the growth in the number of customers we support, especially as we’ve expanded into some of the more far-flung places, we’ve had to become more specialised in the roles we have in the business.
Which, I think, is absolutely for the best, as it means we are all focused on doing the bits we are best at, and delivering the best we can to the customers.
5. Can you share a memorable moment or milestone you experienced at DRAMS that resonates with you, especially as we celebrate our 50th anniversary?
I’ve been at DRAMS for 8 years, so only a portion of the whole 50 years the company has been in business, and like I said, a lot has changed in that time. We have more customers, producing new and different spirit types, in new countries around the world.
All of those were moments and milestones for the company but the one thing that stands out for me, personally, as the biggest moment would be when I started on my first Implementation project. When I look back on it, the thing that stands out is the journey, the learning process, the ways we worked with the customer to deliver what they needed and that final moment of actually getting them across the line.
6. What would you consider to be DRAMS biggest successes/achievements in the time that you’ve worked for the company?
From a company perspective, I remember when we first started talking with our first Tequila customer. Internally at DRAMS there were loads of conversations about what having a tequila customer would mean for the system and for us as a business. Lots of discussions about how different it would be from all our other customers at that point.
And for me, I remember thinking about how the Customer Care team need to provide help to this new Spanish speaking customer when they phoned for support!
From the conversations happening internally, I knew that most of the team could speak English to some degree, but I just kept thinking about how they could phone me for help and that we might not be able to communicate to the same level.
And so, I started learning Spanish for that very reason.
Not because I thought I was going to be able to have full blown conversations with them, but because I wanted to at least be able to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ and muddle my way through a basic conversation.
To me, that felt like something I could do to make sure I could do my best for our customers.
7. Can you share a specific challenge you faced in your role and the solution you and your team implemented to overcome it?
There’s been lots of challenges over the years, but you get difficult and you get ‘difficult’.
Small things can come up and they can be challenging to solve, but you solve them and you move on.
Other times, it’s just the way a project unfolds, things don’t go the way you or a customer hoped. In those cases we’ve always just banded together to work through the issues, get the customer to a better place and the project back on track.
8. Can you share a memorable experience where you directly impacted a customer’s success story?
I’ve been thinking about this, and I have one, it’s something I am immensely proud of so I’m going to take this opportunity to blow my own trumpet.
So, this all starts back when everybody had to go and work from home because of COVID.
That period of time was difficult for everyone, there was so much uncertainty, and it was challenging to adjust to working from home.
For us and our customers – I imagine everyone had at least some concerns about how things were going to pan out.
But, actually, what happened for us in the Customer Care team, is that we got busier. Part of it was that all our customers also had to start working from home, so we had to help support them, making sure they were set-up to access everything they needed remotely etc.
The other thing that happened at this time, was that a number of our customers started producing hand sanitiser.
Because they switched from producing drinkable alcohol, to using the alcohol to make hand sanitiser instead they needed to update the reports they were producing for HMRC to reflect this.
Since our customers use DRAMS to produce these reports for HMRC, they contacted us for help to make sure this change was accounted for in the DRAMS solution and in the custom reports the system produced for them.
And so, there was one customer who I helped with that process, and it was great. You know, that was my job. I helped them through the process, and I made sure that we got it right for them.
Around about that time, Nicola Sturgeon was doing her daily bulletins. I wasn’t able to listen to them all, but this one day, I had it on in the background while I was working, and she mentioned companies that were making hand sanitiser.
And in particular she named that customer I had helped. And to me, that felt like a ‘wow’ moment. To know that I had helped, and I was a part of that success story, even in some small way.
So yeah, that moment stands out for me. Just to hear them mentioned and to know that I’d helped get them there, really was a big thing for me.
9. Over the years with DRAMS, what important lesson have you learned about our industry?
I think what stands out to me is the warehouses, which is perhaps because my area of special interest is DRAMS Scan and the barrel scanning functionality.
Before my first site visit, I would always think of warehouses as big dusty, dirty, empty places and I thought the warehouses that you saw on tours were just the ones they had prettied up for the tourists and the photos.
But it isn’t! They’re all like that, all so well organised and well maintained. They are not the sort of chaotic place that I originally imagined. They all take so much pride in their warehouses.
All the customers keep their warehouses so very well organised, and that when you point to a random barrel they can tell you what’s in it.
It blows my mind, and it makes me so happy to know that its DRAMS and DRAMS Scan that helps them achieve that!
