Being people facing and customer centric, it offers variety - the vital spice of my work life. No two days ever look the same, with a variety of customers, projects and technologies to look across - between the strong relationship focus and the variety of projects, it’s an epic combo that keeps me jazzed to do what I do everyday.

What does a day-in-the life look like? Between coffees, this is what I get up to:

Building relationships with customers

A lot of my day is spent building relationships with customers, and having those small ‘in between’ conversations, to help better understand them as an individual. In order to do this, I'll ensure I gather insights from customer updates and understand product updates so I can have meaningful conversations with our customers.

This will be followed up with weekly check-ins about a new technology we’re piloting, to quarterly strategic reviews - where we share insights and trends, show the value they get from using the Auror platform and any other opportunities they can consider to leverage the platform further.

Strategic account planning

My job is to ensure that we are going above and beyond to align with our customer’s strategic goals - and that takes a lot of careful planning. I’ll spend time each day planning how we can help them achieve goals, learn from other best-in-class retailers and utilise innovative technology solutions.

Partnering with Product and Customer Success

It would be impossible to do this role without working closely with our Auror Product and Customer success teams. Each day I’ll spend time catching up with our Customer Success team to help share context, plan pilots, product communications and platform roll-outs. They in return, will keep me across how engaged users are and we work together to workshop any further opportunities.

Working with Product is equally important. Product Managers, Designers, Engineers and Quality Analysts keep me across any new features or changes that are coming up, so we can communicate these to our customers. I can also be the voice for our customers, with our product team - to help them understand our customers perspectives, to ensure what features get prioritised and built.

Can you share the most memorable project you’ve worked on?

In 2021, I was working with one of our biggest retail partners based in New Zealand. They have a huge number of stores, who noticed a rise in theft, and an increase in violence aimed at their team. I saw this as an opportunity to improve the situation, by deploying some proactive ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) tech in their stores.

We tabled this with their team, and they were really interested in the idea! But, we hit a wall. They needed to shuffle their priorities, in order to make this happen - which, in a big organisation, is easier said than done and unfortunately had to park the project for the quarter. Not long after, their Loss Prevention team needed a new technology project, to showcase in an upcoming internal conference - ANPR was the ticket and we were in!

With help from our incredible design team and ANPR product experts at Auror, we set up an interactive experience at the conference where visitors could try out the instore ANPR experience. This was the touch of magic we needed to get the company committed to the project and get it moving.

The following month, we were able to launch a pilot in two of their stores to test how the technology helped their stores prevent losses and reduce high-conflict events. After just two months, we saw significant reductions in shrink (from the store’s stock take results), increased police presence at the store (making the store team feel safer) and an uplift in the number of events the store team were able to prevent (not to mention a 100 day payback period for the technology and a 700+% ROI).

Great news is that we’re now rolling this tech out to their network to improve safety and reduce loss across the board!

How do you contribute to the Loss Prevention industry? 

Building those networks! I love helping create connections between retailers within the loss prevention space.

Part of my role is to facilitate a few events a year, where we bring the retailers together to discuss key issues they’re facing, learn about hot topics (like information privacy) and provide LP stakeholders with networking opportunities. I always aim to add value for our customers, by being a connector of different LP specialists when they have questions or need advice. 

The LP space in ANZ is very small, so many of the retailers have worked together before. But for those that haven’t, they often work in small teams and are the only people with LP knowledge inside their businesses, so they get lots of value from comparing notes with their peers. 

From events like this, and more casual introductions, we’re seeing some exciting movement away from traditional ‘competitor’ mindset, to more of a ‘we’re all in this together’ approach to tackling loss as a community - this is how we can make the most progress to reducing harm in the community.