Liam Celebrating 10 Years at De Facto Software

Our customer service manager, Liam B. has reached an important milestone in his journey with De Facto Software this month as he celebrates ten years in the business.  We asked him to share some of his experiences with us. 

Can you remember your first day? What stands out?

I don’t really remember the specifics of my first day, other than making an immediate start on learning the system with a training session introducing financials within the De Facto ERP Classic software. Fortunately, having done an accounting module at university and having some ERP experience from previously using SAP, it wasn’t completely foreign, but was still a lot take in initially!

How has the technology changed during your time here?

I don’t think there’s been any huge technology changes since I started other than moving from phones to taking calls through Microsoft Teams and our desktop PCs getting noticeably smaller. The ERP Classic software has gone through incremental improvements over the years though, and I’ve been able to see EDP ERP development progress with my involvement in using it gradually increasing over time.

What's been the most rewarding part of your role?

One of the benefits of working in support is that we can often see a very quick turnaround on the things we’re working on and how that has benefitted the customer. It’s always very rewarding knowing that your work (be it a simple issue or something more complex) has helped someone out and that they’re appreciative of that.

What have you enjoyed most about working with your colleagues?

Everyone is always very willing to help each other and share ideas. It’s especially nice in more recent years to have been able to be the one doing the helping more and assisting new members of the team like colleagues had done when I was a new starter. In the support team specifically I think we’ve also got a lot of shared interests that allow us to get along very well, even if the fantasy football can get competitive at times!

Now that you are the manager of the customer service team, can you envisage making any changes or improvements to the way things are done?

There are already a few little things that we’ve done like modernising parts of the training for our new starters and documenting some of internal processes in more detail to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Further to this I’ve created a shared document within the team to allow us to list ideas for support process improvements. There are already some good suggestions which we can hopefully get actioned in the not too distant future.

How do you see AI playing a role in customer support over the next 5-10 years. Do you think Chatbots can ever do as good a job as real people?

AI can already be a useful tool available to us for things like trying debug SQL errors; however, a certain level of understanding is still required for the response to be helpful. It’s hard to predict what role it may or may not play in customer support in the future, but I suspect it could assist in various areas such as searching our existing knowledge base and documentation, recommending trouble shooting steps, and spotting abnormal behaviors. In terms of Chatbots, I think the question is “even if a Chatbot could do as a good a job as a real person, would people want to use it?” There’s already backlash to AI use in certain industries and for many areas like communication, creativity and entertainment people will likely always prefer something less artificial and more human.

Many thanks to Liam for his many years of dedicated service. If you would like to learn more about working at De Facto, take a look at our About Us page.