Empathy and understanding are two cornerstones of great customer experiences, which is why life experience has always been a vital element of Activus Connect’s approach to recruitment.
Hope Wild, one of our Team Experience Coordinators, brings plenty of life experience to the table, but also a natural desire to help people in need, which she says is her calling in life. We can all learn a lot from Hope’s empathetic nature, so here are a few highlights from a recent chat with her.
Building Rapport from Day One
After discovering Activus Connect on a Facebook group, Hope joined the company in January 2020 as an independent contractor. Her first project was Ambassador call testing, which involved taking calls from new Ambassadors as part of their training.
“It was a lot of fun,” she remembered. “Not only were we helping new recruits learn the ropes, but we were also building a strong rapport with our colleagues at the same time. The team environment that Activus created allowed us to support each other and relate to people on a much deeper level.”
In April 2020, Hope moved onto a new contract, but she still found it easy to keep the same friendships and relationships she’d developed in her first few months. Since then, these personal connections have been directly impacting customer experience.
“When you build rapport with your colleagues it becomes easier to put yourself in their shoes, which helps them apply that same empathy to customer interactions,” she said. “Activus focuses on people, not numbers, so they provide loads of opportunities for rapport building and make us feel like part of a family. It’s a workplace environment I’ve never experienced before and easily the best company I’ve ever worked for.”
Helping Others as a Way of Life
When Hope decided to study mental health at community college, the experience touched her heart and made her realize that helping people was her true calling.
“As soon as I was accepted to the course, I was so ecstatic that I got a tattoo of the word “empathy” on my shoulder,” she said. “Empathy is everything in mental health because people experience incredibly difficult things in life and you need to be able to understand them.”
During her time at Activus, Hope has been applying that empathetic nature to her work, reaching out to her colleagues and answering questions on the internal chat to help as many people as possible, all with complete transparency.
“I’m an open book,” she laughed. “I believe that if my life experience can help someone else, why not share it? People feel less alone when they have somebody to relate to.”
As she continued working with Activus, we realized how great she was at helping her fellow Ambassadors, so we offered her the chance to become a Team Experience Coordinator—TEC for short.
“Becoming a TEC is the ultimate opportunity to help people,” she said. “I can call people on the team and speak to them as often as possible, just to check-in and see if they’re okay, which helps people know that they can talk to us about anything.”
Hope remembers what it was like to fear calling her boss when she was sick or unable to work that day. She believes that her team should feel comfortable reaching out to her, knowing that she won’t chastise or judge anyone.
“We all live under different circumstances and we’re all unique individuals, so making people feel bad for something they can’t control is completely unfair,” she said. “The fact that Activus shares this belief is incredibly refreshing.”
Diverse, Flexible Work Environment
Although she was born and raised in Baltimore County, Maryland, Hope is currently living in the city of Baltimore with her 16-year old daughter—Hope’s “sidekick”, as she calls her. Since working from home, Hope has had more time to spend with her daughter, as well as time to recover from some unfortunate invasive surgery.
“After the procedure, I took a few days off, but I was soon able to work part-time and recover at the same time,” she said. “I could just sit at my desk with an ice pack and a few ibuprofen and go about my workday. The TEC team is like a family and we cover each other for everything, which is another thing I love about working here.”
Before joining Activus Connect, Hope worked in-office as a medical administrative assistant and in other customer-service related positions. Since the transition to work-at-home, Hope has been able to focus on many more life events while maintaining a steady career, mainly due to the enjoyment she gets out of interacting with her colleagues.
“I really enjoyed my past roles, but the team rapport felt completely different, which shows me that Activus is taking the right approach to recruitment,” she said. “We’re bringing on a wide variety of team-motivated, empathetic people from many different age groups, which brings a great mix of wisdom and youth to the group.”