Meet the CEO: Moneypenny Group CEO, Joanna Swash 

Meet the CEO: Moneypenny Group CEO, Joanna Swash 

Tell us a little about yourself. 

I was recruited as Moneypenny’s first salesperson in 2005; today I am Group CEO. I am passionate about Wrexham and nurturing our people culture and creating a place where people want to work. As a business, Moneypenny answers outsourced calls, live chats and digital comms and we provide our clients with gold standard CX by embracing technology to ensure first class human connections. 

I believe in supporting people so that they can become the best that they can be and through my work on the Prime Minister’s Business Council in recent years have been heavily supporting the education and business pillars to help provide the foundation for the next generation to be their best, bolstering the country’s economy. 

Tell us about your company.  

Moneypenny is the UK’s leading provider of outsourced telephone & web-based communications to businesses of all shapes and sizes. we put trust at the heart of everything we do. Fast-forward two decades and what started as a single, dedicated PA (who’s still with us today) looking after calls for a handful of local clients, is now a 1000-strong team working across continents from our state-of-the-art UK headquarters in Wrexham, North Wales and US office in Atlanta, Georgia. 

How would you characterise 2023 in your sector so far? 

2023 has been a busy one so far and we have recently introduced a new bespoke service for businesses, which sees our employees working as a full outsourced customer service team operating within our clients’ systems, as if sitting within their office. Developed to help businesses achieve new operational efficiencies and address recruitment challenges, Moneypenny’s teams can support in-house resources, or be fully outsourced. 

The service is completely bespoke depending on the clients’ requirements, and services include everything from responding to inbound queries, proactively engaging with enquiries and customers, booking appointments, managing social media accounts, overseeing reviews platforms, as well as payment handling, ID verification and order processing. The Moneypenny team can also record activity directly into client’s lead management and CRM systems to save time and ensure a seamless approach to data management. 

What are the key opportunities you are gearing towards as a company? 

Harnessing the power that the latest technologies give to our people, to deliver better and more bespoke services to our clients and to ensure we keep providing the very best and efficient CX for our clients. 

AI can help businesses of all shapes and sizes in all kinds of ways, everything from repetitive tasks, for example, to predictive analytics, finding trends in noisy and complex data and pulling out those small nuggets of information that were previously hidden, to identifying fraud or security threats. 

Specifically for SMEs, however, AI can be a powerful tool in customer experience. From using chatbots to provide a timely and seamless service to automated support tickets and order confirmations, AI can help to create a more efficient customer experience, driving growth and loyalty. 

Al can also be used to personalise the customer experiences by analysing customer behaviour, purchase history and preferences, to improve your customer’s experience. 

What are your biggest challenges? 

The US can be a challenging market due to the scale and because each state is like its own country, however, we are growing quickly. We have strong acquisition plans and are excited about our future plans there. 

How would you analyse the economic conditions that are influencing those challenges? 

It has been a challenging few years for most businesses and we are constantly reacting to our clients’ needs and being agile. Whether that was in the Covid pandemic with new outbound call services to help clients return calls after furlough periods or our new Bespoke Customer Teams service which means that our PA’s can help our clients with everything from responding to inbound queries, proactively engaging with enquiries and customers, booking appointments, managing social media accounts, overseeing reviews platforms, as well as payment handling, ID verification and order processing. 

What projects or developments are you most proud of? 

Our US growth and new appointments. We recently recruited a new CEO North America – Richard Culberson, and a new Head of People – Jade Esteves and we are really excited about the impact they are having and the growth we are seeing over in the US, particularly in the Franchise and Legal sectors. 

What are your goals for the future? 

We will continue to invest in our people and listen to our clients so we can remain agile to their needs and offer them the services and support they need and acquisitions will continue to be a core pillar to our growth in the US.  

What would be your advice for budding entrepreneurs? 

Do not be a sheep. Trust your gut, be bold, make decisions based on your market, your product, and your data. 

I am a huge advocate of trusting your instincts. We’ve all had those moments where our gut was telling us to do one thing and we didn’t listen to it. In history, some people just seem to have this unspoken wisdom; an inner compass that guides them to make the right decision. 

From Bob Lutz turning around the lagging Chrysler company in the 1990s with the introduction of the Dodge Viper, based on it ‘feeling right’, to Steve Jobs attributing his invention of the iPhone to ‘not letting the noise of others drown your inner voice’, we should learn that lesson and be self-aware enough to trust our instinct. 

 Stay tuned for more Meet the CEO content, with interesting insights from CEO’s across Wales.