People of Vox: Spotlight on Kay Korff
At Vox, we believe our employees are the beating heart of our company, with merit and value built into all our available positions. In this edition of People of Vox, we meet Kay Korff, who works in the Customer Care division as the Operations Manager for Customer Engagement and Service Delivery. Kay is a master of the arts of patience, process and turning annoyed customers into satisfied ones.
As the Operations Manager for Customer Engagement and Service Delivery at Vox, Kay is based in Johannesburg, and her portfolio covers dealing with complaints and customer feedback across multiple channels. You could say that Kay is the person who steps in to help steer the conversation when things have gone wrong.
She doesn’t answer every call or message herself, but she leads the teams who do, and who are based nationally around South Africa. Her role includes strategy, hands‑on problem solving and supporting the frontline people who speak to customers every day.
Kay’s story is a reminder that great customer service is made by people who show up – every day – and continue to face up to the challenging moments. We find out more about Kay’s daily work life, some of the difficult moments that she’s faced and how she likes to unwind.
From Construction to Customer Care: Persistence Pays!
Kay has just completed 10 years of working at Vox – a commendable achievement! – and is grateful every day to her line manager, Albert, and her team members for a winning team culture. She explains that she actually came to the company after working in the construction industry for a few years.
“I was working in an admin capacity,” she says, “and I had friends at the time who were working at Vox. It was obviously a totally different industry to where I was then based, but I really liked the sound of their company culture and decided to apply to Vox whenever I could see an administrative position where I thought I might be a fit. I applied on and off for about three years.
“Eventually the day came when I took a risk and decided to resign from my construction work employment without actually having another job lined up. Amazingly, within a week, I had an interview request from Vox, and I was offered the job very quickly! I really believe that it was divine intervention after all my previous efforts.”
When she was finally on board at Vox, Kay discovered to her great joy that the culture she found matched the positive stories her friends had previously told her about the company. “I am grateful to this day that my persistence eventually paid off! The company’s willingness to treat employees like people, and to listen and support them through life events, is what makes Vox a place where I’m happy to stay.”
Having started out as a consumer accounts agent at Vox, looking after customers, Kay used her administrative experience and learned about the systems and processes involved in sending customers invoices and statements and doing first line queries.
She believes that her career grew partly because her original line manager gave her the chance to try and to fail – safely. “Ruth continued to give me more complex work, when I asked for it, but with a safety net at the same time. She supported me while still giving me room to learn,” she says.
Kay then moved deeper into customer service until she was able to embrace her current role and begin managing teams who work across the various consumer platforms.
“Our jobs are largely about trying to make sure that the customers are happy,” she says. “Client service is a skill, and I believe that you really have to have a passion for your customers. There’s also no getting away from the fact that sometimes we have to deal with angry customers.
“One piece of great advice that I got from my manager, which I try to live by today, was to have two personalities for your work and your home life, and to make sure that you don’t carry the one with the other. So you take your work persona for helping customers, and then if the conversation becomes difficult, it helps you to not take the conversation too personally.”
Day by Day
On a practical level, Kay’s working weeks include quality control and systems improvement, meaning that she checks to see that due diligence was followed for each complaint, spotting where processes failed, and gathering together the right people together to stop the same problem happening again.
“It’s important to be aware of the different channel options on which the complaint came through. We need to treat calls, emails, social posts and review sites differently, because each needs a distinct approach,” she explains.
“At the same time, no one day is ever the same in customer service. You can try to plan your day as well as you think you can, but irate customers don’t come with a watch or time clock. You don’t know when the next complaint is going to drop.”
And so the name of the game is being flexible and able to change pathways quickly! But Kay’s team does more than extinguish fires; they aim to root out the causes. When an agent or a process has unfortunately let a customer down, Kay meets with managers to flag the issue. She emphasises that feedback is not about blaming people but about stopping repeat problems.
“I want to be part of turning problems and issues into actual changes in processes,” she explains. “Solving individual problems is good; preventing them is even better! I love being able to figure out exactly how to resolve a customer’s complaint and make a difference to how they feel about the company, especially when they go from being an unhappy to a satisfied customer.”
Kay admits she used to take complaints home and felt them deeply. “Today, I still struggle sometimes to switch off, but I’ve learned coping strategies,” she says. “When it’s time to switch off, I enjoy cooking and sometimes painting.
“I’ve taught myself how to work in acrylic paints and at the moment I have three half‑finished paintings in the garage, which I hope to finish when I have time to take some leave. I like the feeling of starting a painting, and then finishing it and having it completed. It’s like building a puzzle,” she smiles.
Handling the Hardest Moments… and Moving Back into Joy
Although she’s recently completed 10 years of working for the company, Kay outlines a particularly challenging period that took place quite early in her Vox career and is still fresh in her memory.
“My younger daughter, Leanè, was born prematurely at 32 weeks and she had to spend 27 days in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which was very challenging for me, both emotionally and logistically. But I discovered then how truly supportive Vox is as a company, both during this particular time and the period that followed, when she was finally at home with me.
“To this day, I am very grateful to all of my managers and colleagues, and today my child is nine years old and a healthy, magical little being with gorgeous fiery red hair, which I just adore!”
Kay continues: “My oldest daughter, Nicoleen, is currently in Matric, living her best life! I’ve decided that, in my opinion at least, it’s actually the parents of Matric students who are the family members who take the most strain during this all-important final school year! I am quite looking forward to the Matric year being over,” she laughs.
[Editor’s note: I think that Kay could be speaking here for the parents of Matric students around the country…?]
“But I do find that God is just amazing in His ability to get you through things that you don’t even know that you’re going through. I had no idea that it was difficult until it was done,” she says reflectively.
When she’s able to take some down-time, Kay paints, follows global Formula One racing, and plans some travel moments. She’d love to watch a Grand Prix live: “Abu Dhabi is the most practical choice and Monaco is the dream!” she says.
Kay has also made a promise to herself that she will get to Europe one day: “I would like to go to the UK and get a feel of what it means to live a ‘normal’ life there, and not do only touristy things,” she muses.
As a mother of two daughters, and having come from an extended English-Afrikaans family, Kay is fully bilingual and her family is central to her. When her younger daughter asked her once if they were ‘English or Afrikaans?’, her advice to her child was to work out in which language she thinks.
“So it seems like we think in English, but we talk a lot of Afrikaans!” she laughs. This family background also helps her with language, culture and connection in a diverse workplace and with helping Vox’s many ‘rainbow nation’ customers.
Kay also has an identical twin, Ashley, which has led to some interesting moments in her life, including a really funny occasion one day when her twin sister, who was in the area, brought her some lunch at the office. It seems that some of the Voxies that day thought that, in addition to her other many administrative talents, Kay had also mastered the ability to be in two places at once!
Today, Kay is comfortable in her home life and happy at work, and aiming for many more years working at Vox. “I really like the fact that at Vox, we are not just numbers on a payroll, but actual human beings who interact with each other with respect and care, working well together. We know each other and are a community, and this is what helps to get me through challenging moments and come out on the other side in a positive way,” she smiles.
About Author
