From a declined card to a credit union's operations

The first call I handled without a supervisor listening, in June 1997, came from a farmer near Grand-Sault. His card had been declined at a feed supplier while the order sat on the loading dock. The account was fine; a fraud rule had reacted to an unusual amount. I could release the block, but only after a callback procedure that took eleven minutes. He waited, and so did the supplier's next customer. I was twenty-two, working for Corrandine Card Services in a Moncton contact centre that answered in English and French, and I had just finished a business degree at Collège universitaire Vallandière in Québec City.

I had grown up in Rivière-du-Loup speaking French at home and English mostly on the hockey bus. Moncton gave me a job because I could do both. It also showed me early that a bilingual service is a staffing question before it is a principle. On a Monday morning in January, the French queue could be three times longer than the English one simply because fewer of us were scheduled. Nobody had decided that French callers should wait; the schedule had decided for us.

I became a team leader in 1999 and moved into operations management in 2003, responsible for workforce planning across about 220 agents. I learnt to forecast calls by half-hour, to separate the causes of a long queue and to argue for staff before a peak instead of apologising after it. I also learnt the limits of the forecast, and the patience of agents asked to stay late for the third time in a week. A billing error or a system fault could produce more calls in an afternoon than a model predicted for a week.

In 2008 I moved to Montréal to run mortgage servicing for Maudrelle Mortgage Corporation, a privately owned lender that funded residential mortgages through securitisation and sold some to institutional investors. My team handled renewals, payment changes and arrears for about 41,000 mortgages. The work arrived on a calendar: each maturity date was known years in advance, yet the company still treated renewals as a surprise every spring. I built a maturity schedule that told the servicing team, months ahead, how many conversations each week would need.

Halvernet Payments, a merchant payment processor near Toronto, hired me in 2013 to run dispute and risk operations. Our merchants lost money when a card payment was disputed, and they lost more when fraud went unnoticed overnight. Halvernet already monitored transactions around the clock. I saw what an analyst who could telephone a merchant at three in the morning was able to prevent, and I saw what it cost to employ that analyst. During a three-hour authorisation outage in 2015 I also watched how much depended on rules written before the outage, rather than decisions improvised during it.

I came back to Moncton in 2017 as vice-president of member service and branches at Brayloche, twenty months after the merger that created it. Two cultures were still visible: different opening hours, different scripts, different ideas of what a branch manager could approve. Over four years we reduced the network from 29 branches to 21, kept cash machines and two advice days a week in four of the villages we left, and moved most routine calls to a single contact centre. Some members were angry, and several were right about the travelling we had underestimated for older customers. One retired fisherman in the northeast wrote to me every month for a year. His letters changed how we scheduled the advice days, and I still keep the last one he sent.

In March 2021 our board confirmed me as chief operating officer. Since then the decisions I am asked to explain most often are about readiness that looks expensive on an ordinary day: bilingual advisers hired for renewal season, an overnight fraud desk, generators and satellite links at seven branches. I report to our chief executive and present to the board and its risk committee. I do not sit on our board, and I am careful to separate the recommendations I make from the decisions the directors take.

Outside work I serve on the board of Centre d'alphabétisation Peltrevaux, an adult literacy charity in Moncton, where I sit on its finance committee. That role taught me what it is like to receive a management report instead of writing one. I now want to bring an operator's questions to an independent board, while remembering that a director's job is to examine management's plan, not to run it again.

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