CareerTalk with Hannah Ratcliff-Barnes, Social Media Lead, HSBC

The CCMA’s CareerTalk podcast returned for the third episode of its fourth series.

The latest guest to join our CEO, Leigh Hopwood in the CareerTalk hotseat was Hannah Ratcliff-Barnes, Social Media Lead for HSBC.

Hannah has been in the role at HSBC since April 2023, having led social media at NFU Mutual for four years prior. How has the role changed, and how have customers’ interactions with social media changed over that time? Here are some key takeaways from Hannah’s discussion with our CEO, Leigh.

• Hannah’s social media team at HSBC is the first of its kind within HSBC’s global contact centre network. “It’s fairly new to the contact centre – we’re the first to be doing it at scale. We’ve built the team from the ground up and it’s a multiskilled team. We don’t just do social media, there’s chat and there’s outbound calling. The customer comes to us from unverified channels and we work out how best we can support them. Our focus is the customer no matter what the channel is.”
• Happy customers is a product of happy colleagues. “Culture is something I’m so passionate about, and making sure we have the right environment to thrive and actually be able to effectively support our customers in the first place. I spend as much time with the team as possible.”
• Staying across a rapidly-changing technology landscape is vital. “I spend a lot of time call listening outside my own team to learn from others. I try and stay across what’s happening in the industry – is there anything in social media, automation, tech that we should be looking at? We’re a young team – having only gone live just over two years ago. But then the onus is on us to ensure we’re having good relationships with internal teams to keep informed and and keep the momentum going.”
• England’s Red Roses Rugby World Cup-winning team are a huge inspiration. “The women in that team – there are so many inspirational leaders. You’ve got women who have spoken up about body image, women who are queer, women of colour. The culture within that team inspires me, their self-belief and the self-talk side of what they do is so important. Being able to be yourself and succeed as yourself is something that I love to see.”

Listen to the episode in full:

Listen to previous guests from series four, including:

• Brenda Beavon, Customer Services Solutions Director, ArvataConnect
• Jon Hall, Customer Experience Manager, Fibrus

Upcoming guests for the series include:

• Rachel Hulme, Liberata  17 October, Live on Linkedin at 12pm
• Mick O’Brien, First Customer Contact 24 October, Live on Linkedin at 12pm
• Kirk Bradley, BUPA 28 November, Live on Linkedin at 12pm
• Rachel Lewis, NatWest 5 December, Live on Linkedin at 12pm