When our customers succeed, so do we. When we help our customers this has a knock on effect of helping them to build fantastic relationships with their clients, to boost the finance industry as a whole. This is why we need great people backing up our customers, including Melanie Rollason, a Customer Success Specialist based in the United Kingdom.
At Spotlight Reporting, Melanie is tasked with helping accountants to level up their services and achieve greater success in their chosen area. Primarily, this means helping them to establish advisory services to open up new lines of revenue, and use technology to streamline operations and reduce the burden of manual tasks.
A global team for great support
To serve our global customer base, the Customer Success Team sits across the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Toronto, with Melanie based in the UK.
She says, “I love the challenges that the global team brings, from chatting in different time zones to sharing best practice across the world.”
Our global Customer Success team, having partnered with more than 500 top accounting firms around the world, functions not so much as consultants or a support desk as strategic partners to help clients achieve their goals.
This process will start with a Customer Success Specialist, such as Melanie, teaming up with a client to take them through the onboarding journey, including a kickstart call and a series of training sessions. This concludes with certification and is followed up by regular interactions and half-yearly strategic reviews to ensure maximum ROI. Personalisation, access to premium resources and best practice templates, all verifiable with a certification makes Spotlight’s customer success functionality what it is.
On her work Melanie comments, “We’re helping accountants be the best that they can possibly be. We help them to generate revenue from advisory, automate compliance, and help them to build up incredible relationships with their clients.”
Back to where it all began
With a well-established career that eventually led her to customer success, Melanie has been working in the world of finance since the late 90s, building up her understanding of financial practices and how to best support businesses.
Melanie stepped right out of university to KPMG, saying she recognised that the massive firm would give her a great launch pad and professional grounding. Spending five years at the firm, Melanie trained in auditing and qualified as a Chartered Accountant. From here she moved through different finance positions in the retail sector, working for Next and Sainsburys before taking voluntary redundancy in 2006 to set up her own accountancy practice.
For 13 years Melanie ran her own practice, gaining invaluable insights and understandings along the way, before following a deeper interest and passion for the digital world. She started off at TaxCalc in a Support role and was promoted to help them set up their first Customer Success team, before moving over to Silverfin’s Customer Success team, and finally setting up camp at Spotlight.
There’s no doubt that the last 20+ years have spearheaded a notable shift in the finance industry, with technology at the heart of this. Today Melanie says she’s most interested in the intersection of accountancy practices and digital transformation.
She says, “I have a deep understanding of accountancy, and also of how accountancy practices run and the tech stack behind them. I have a huge interest in the digital transformation of accountancy practices, having been there myself! It is a very interesting time for the industry both in the UK and globally.”
Stepping outside the office
Life outside of work is full and varied for Melanie, with sport, family, music, travelling and pets all in the mix.
Melanie played tennis as a junior and has played at the AELTC, Wimbledon when she represented KPMG UK in the KPMG European Championships. Skiing is also on the agenda, with Melanie and her family making the trip to the snow every winter.
To stay fit and embrace her love of sport, she ran the London Marathon in 2017, and now enjoys a lot of peloton bike and treadmill challenges. Melanie’s family also partakes in healthy fun, with her 13 year old son an avid cricketer and her 11 year old daughter a lover of hockey and netball, where Melanie is team manager.
Lockdown saw Melanie return to the piano, which she played as a teenager. Taking lessons over Zoom she made her way to Piano Grade 5, and now loves singing along and helping her daughter to learn a few favourites including “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables.
Family is a big one for Melanie, with travel and furry friends making life exciting. She says, “I have done a fair bit of travelling over the years, and more recently with my hubbie and children. We went to Costa Rica this summer which was incredible, a proper adventure. I’m also a huge dog lover, we have a bichon cross called Bertie and a very naughty chihuahua called Lottie!”
Learn more about how the Spotlight team can help you make a success of advisory services at your firm here.
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