Meet a WEXer: Sharon Walters

In just over a year at WEX Europe, Sharon Walters has built a customer onboarding process from the ground up for our growing European virtual payments business. When she joined us, that process and her role as customer onboarding manager didn’t exist anywhere in the company. Creating a blueprint and getting it up and running meant tapping into her 20+ years of experience at American Express, as well as taking a deep dive to learn all about our European virtual payments business and customers.

“The first couple of months were hectic as I got my head around our product, system, people, and how everything connected,” remembers Sharon. “At the same time, I was working on designing a process that would internally streamline how we onboard customers and provide them the best possible initial experience with us.”

Making the Move to Virtual Payments

While at American Express, Sharon worked in a variety of business units including foreign exchange, business travel, corporate payments, and merchant services. Her last four years with the company were in a start-up business unit tasked with setting up a new prepaid card product in Europe. That experience prepared her for life at WEX in terms of being in a smaller group, making decisions on the ground, and quick turn-around times. Sharon knew that when she left American Express, it would be for a company without several layers of management where decisions could be made quickly and she could interact with everyone.

When she began looking for new job opportunities, Sharon placed WEX at the top of her list because of our leadership position in financial services and payments. “I was curious about virtual cards and how they operated, as I’d not worked in that area before,” says Sharon. “WEX also afforded me the chance to work in a B2B environment, and that was quite exciting as it was a new area for me professionally.”

Collaboration is Key

Internal collaboration is at the core of the onboarding process that Sharon launched almost a year ago. Customer onboarding touches various parts of the business, so her team works with managers in sales, customer relationships, implementation, and account services. From the back-office perspective, onboarding will also reach out to our tech support team if something is broken in those critical early days for a new customer. As Sharon notes, “You become the face of the company and really get involved with every aspect of the customer’s life in those first couple of months as they come through the process.”

With so many people to interact with and so much to juggle, it’s no surprise that project management and relationship skills are at the top of the list for Sharon’s team. To be successful, onboarding requires navigating a lot of moving parts and different timelines for multiple customers. As for soft skills, tenacity and a level head are definite assets that help team members keep their focus and handle the demands of competing priorities.

“Based on the success we’ve had with the onboarding role in Europe, the North American team has now adopted the same approach,” says Sharon. “In less than a year, we’ve been able to demonstrate the importance of this role, and to have our head office adopt our processes and methodology is a testament to the work we have carried out.”

Sharon’s not ready to rest on her laurels just yet. As she works to continually improve and document the onboarding process, she’s most excited to be working in a role where the focus is client satisfaction. A self-proclaimed advocate for customer service, she observes that the most rewarding aspect of her work is hearing back from a client that we’ve done a good job.