Transferrable skills, support and courage: a recipe for admin career success

Pursuing an administration career was always on Raffaella Hunter-Ciardelli’s mind, but it took the right job at KINNECT to spur her into using her enthusiasm for learning and transferrable skills in customer service to make it happen.

Transferrable skills

Based in Cairns, Customer Success Team Leader Raffaella enjoys her work ensuring our clients have a smooth onboarding process, deftly taking them through the ins and outs of Carelever and figuring how we can run our services alongside them as a partner. This knack for problem solving was developed in her previous role as a Customer Service Officer in the warranties and complaints department for a large electrical appliance retailer.

However, while the problem-solving opportunities were endless, the role became increasingly stressful and emotionally taxing, and with no career progression in sight, Raffaella was inspired to follow a new path: “I knew that administration was definitely something I wanted to look into, particularly in the medical field as I really enjoy helping people and getting that rewarding feeling looking after people’s health.”

With transferable customer service skills including issue resolution, researching, listening and a great phone manner under her belt, Raffaella applied to KINNECT. Although, initially unsuccessful after an interview, she was soon called back for a new role. Describing the experience, Raffaella said she “…accepted the role with both hands. I knew this was meant to be.”

Support

Raffaella started working in Medical Support and Reception at the Cairns clinic April 2022. KINNECT’s approach to onboarding and training instantly made an impression:

“I was in awe of the company and the structure. I’d come from a major retail company where we were all numbers – the turnover was high and there was no interest in our careers. When I got here and Kevin [KINNECT’s CEO] called me for the first time and congratulated me on my job, I was shocked. I got a call every week for the first five weeks – I was amazed how tight-knit and caring people were. I also didn’t have training at my previous company and there weren’t many people who had been there long enough to train anyone.

“Having someone take care to train me and make sure I understood things was a new concept to me. Unfortunately, it’s rare in other companies,” she described.

Raffaella started learning the pre-booking process, working through the initial checks to make sure every referral created in the system had what it needed for a service to run smoothly. She then progressed into further stages of a client’s experience with us such as booking appointments in our clinics and then in affiliate clinics.

“I really enjoyed the structure and that every task had a specific process. I really like working on tasks in order and the Medical Support team have that perfected – you can’t miss a step as the system won’t let you progress until you’ve done everything. I loved the role – it wasn’t easy, but not so complicated that I got overwhelmed,” Raffaella explained.

Courage

After mastering bookings and working in the phones team, Raffaella was trained in processing medical results. At this time, she received a company-wide email saying that a new position in Customer Success opened.

“I initially dismissed it as I didn’t think it applied to me – I’d only been working at KINNECT a year. But Lelayna Beverley (from the Customer Success team) sent through another email with a last chance to apply. I decided to give it a shot and added a sentence at the end, saying that I wasn’t going to apply for it but ultimately decided that I wouldn’t know if I could do it if I didn’t try,” she explained.

After being called for an interview, Raffaella was slowly relieved of her results work and received a call that she was successful in getting the role. “It didn’t feel real. I’d never had the responsibility of manager’s role, it was a big change in departments and in the scope of work day-to-day,” she recalled.

What piqued her interest in the Customer Success role? “I wanted to move up. As much as I loved Medical Support, it didn’t have the variety I was looking for. I thrive off constant change and new problems to solve and wasn’t getting enough of that once I’d mastered the key components of being in Medical Support,” Raffaella said.

The role was designed to progress to manager level, and Raffaella spoke to Lelayna about her goals and aspirations so they could be aligned to the goals of the Customer Success Department. “I felt so positive that someone cared. I never felt like I was thrown into the deep end – I may have jumped though – and I’ve been given a lot of help. The confidence they have in me has shown me that I can do hard things. I even expressed interest in applying for the Emerging Leaders Program in 2024 and Clark was very supportive of that,” she said.

Where to next for Raffaella?

As Customer Success Team Leader, Raffaella is responsible for managing the client’s experience through Carelever, acting as their first point of contact for onboarding and setting the system up so it best complements how their organisation works.

She most enjoys having the ability to suggest things to clients that will make their lives easier, saying that: “We can sit down and talk to clients and go over how Carelever works, and I can suggest different ways to set up the back-end system. That might take 30 minutes to an hour of their time, but in the long run, everyone in their organisation who uses Carelever will be positively impacted by those changes.”

Now that she’s adjusted to the role, Raffaella would like to use her enthusiasm for process improvement to develop a uniform set of steps with branches for customisation. “I want to set-up good foundations for our onboarding process and then have room to customise Carelever to look different for our clients, so it compliments their business. I’d also love to grow the department, so we are more available to talk to our clients and put more thought and effort into user-friendly ways to customise the system to close the gap between Carelever and how clients use it,” she enthuses.

For anyone considering a change in career, Raffaella’s advice is: “Don’t doubt yourself and think you don’t have what it takes. There’s not much in administration that you can’t learn. Don’t listen to that inner monologue that you don’t have the skills or experience because that can change very quickly – it did for me. I made myself physically and emotionally available to take on change and new tasks. It’s scary but good things happen outside your comfort zone.”

If you’re interested in a career with support and genuine growth opportunities, why not join us? For information about current vacancies, visit our Careers Centre.