Organisation: Australian Taxation Office
Job Title: Service Delivery Officer, APS4
Word Limit: 200 words for Questions 1 & 2, 500 words for Question 3
Current role: Duties and responsibilities
Within my current role as Accounts Receivable Officer at the Dentsu Aegis Network, I undertake a broad range of tasks which demonstrate customer service skills, communication, teamwork, research and analysis, and decision making. My overall goal is to make contact with customers via phone to negotiate and initiate payment arrangements relating to overdue payments. I am required to maintain a customer focus, including anticipating client needs as well as identifying and providing solutions to problems being experienced by clients. In addition, I analyse, research and synthesise information, collect outstanding debtor information and prepare daily debtor management reporting.
Other responsibilities include working within my team to meet organisational goals in terms of outstanding monies, providing guidance to new team members when required on process and procedure, and using legislation and policy to determine customer requirements. I make a range of decisions, including around the structure of payment plans with customers and provide exceptional customer service management, which has been commended. Familiar with the ATO environment, I have previously undertaken customer-facing ATO roles, including Collections Officer and Auditor roles, giving me a strong understanding of the working environment.
Current role: Achievements
Since commencing in my current role, I have made a significant positive impact within the Accounts Receivable area, reducing overdue accounts and amounts, and gaining positive feedback from customers along the way. Over this time, I have been able to recover and collect large amounts of overdue monies, up to $40 million per month. After working an initial contract role with Dentsu Aegis, I was recalled to the position due to my high standard and delivery of bottom line results.
Upon commencement in my role, the collections were languishing and I, along with my team, have been successful in bringing collections up to the current billing cycle. This has been achieved through excellent customer management skills and proactive strategies with customers. Some large customers have not only been paying on time for the last few cycles, but paying before their due date. Customer responses have been positive, with clients often thanking me for the call and reminder.
I have proven to be a driven employee who can make complex decisions, deal directly with large organisation’s issues and play an important role in my team in order to succeed.
What do you bring to the role?
The most important thing I can bring to this role is quality customer service through the provision to customers of up-to-date, accurate and helpful information which will ensure they don’t need to call back. Having recent and extensive experience in direct customer contact roles requiring exceptional levels of customer service, including collections and financial processing, my communication skills are of a high standard and I am confident in my ability to undertake this role successfully as a result.
In my previous roles within the ATO, I have demonstrated my ability to contact and communicate confidently with customers in order to negotiate and enter into financial arrangements, including debt collection, in a business to business setting. Within my current role, I am responsible for financial collections, entailing calling clients to ensure payment is going to be made, and re-contacting them if the account is not paid by the agreed date. This process requires my ability to be calm and remain professional with sometimes challenging clients and I have successfully brought outstanding debtors up to date due to my ability to communicate with the clients in a clear and concise manner.
In addition to undertaking internal ATO online and in-person training, I have broadened my experience and developed my skills through undertaking a range of roles, including Collections Officer and Auditor. Through these roles, I have developed a reputation for providing clear, comprehensive advice to taxpayers which has led to a quicker return releases.
My ability to foster and maintain relationships has been demonstrated particularly in my ATO role at Box Hill as Auditor, Micro Enterprises and Individuals. Within this role, we worked as a team to audit 19 accounts per week in a fast-paced environment, but one that required attention to detail and responsibility. As a team, we worked together to ensure those who were less experienced were teamed with more experienced personnel and the most efficient working style could be maintained. My contribution to the team ensured collaboration and knowledge sharing as well as assisting others to complete their work.
My ability to work in a changing environment has been demonstrated through being successful in a range of roles both for the ATO and outside. Within my ATO collections role, I ensured customer details and any monetary amounts were correct, based on evidence and history. This included data matching of client tax file numbers, Australian business numbers, company names, dates of birth, addresses and income. In collections, it is important to be able to trust your information and research, because often the client will dispute claims when you contact them. This role required knowledge of a range of business types, including trusts, companies and sole traders.
All of my roles for the ATO and outside organisations have required me to work within procedure, legislation and guidelines and I understand the importance of this aspect of work. My most recent role operated under limited supervision and I was responsible for the management of my own workload under minimal direction.
