People of Vox: Spotlight on Charnee Williams
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 Charnee Williams, who works in the Business Intelligence Department. Charnee is one of those people who strikes you instantly with a sense of her quiet, kind and generally unflappable strength.
As a Vox Business Intelligence (BI) developer, she works for a team that’s generally based in Cape Town, while she herself lives in Joburg. This one sentence alone hints at being flexible, and unafraid to travel and start over in new places – we’ll unpack this later. She also helps to turn obscure or unclear data into usable reports that help colleagues make decisions. That’s another clue to her personality: being able to make sense of sometimes complicated or untidy situations!
We find out more about a person who likes to be private, but who still agreed – when nominated by one of her colleagues – to go under the People of Vox spotlight; who thought that she wasn’t ‘interesting enough’ to be featured in our series, but has had some really interesting moments in her life journey to date.
Let’s get to know Charnee a bit better, starting with her skills as a Business Intelligence detective.
The Data Whisperer
Charnee joined Vox in April 2022 as a BI developer based in Cape Town and she’s been part of Louis van Schalkwyk’s team ever since. Though the team itself is Cape Town‑centred, Charnee works from Joburg, having moved there with her family during her time at Vox.
She speaks warmly about Louis and the rest of the team and says that they all get along well together and that geographical distance doesn’t present any issues: “We are all cogs turning in a machine, getting information out to the people who need it,” she says.
She captures her role neatly in a very few words as follows: “I extract data and make it look pretty,” she explains with a smile. “A lot of people struggle to read data, or else the data can be kind of hidden in the database, so you have to find the best way to pull it out for people to understand the data that you’re giving to them.
“My work isn’t about flashy visuals so much as visibility, and the important thing is accessing and presenting the right records for the right people. I help to make the system’s data more visible and more readable for the users.”
And so, to embroider further, what Charnee does isn’t just pulling numbers out of a database, but also shaping them into something people can read, act on and use easily.
Her scope, and that of her colleagues in the department, reaches out to most of Vox’s departments, including sales and channel managers, the project management office, the finance department and a host of others. “Our entire team, taken as a whole, literally touches on all factors of the business,” she says.
Time management isn’t generally a problem for her, but wanting to help people can add pressure. She clarifies: “The biggest thing for me is if I feel that there’s too many people waiting for too many things… that’s when I feel the pressure.”
And so prioritising becomes a daily art, interspersing quick wins to clear her to-do list with longer tasks that require stretches of focused time.
A regional sales manager who works with her confirms how much she likes to help people, saying: “Charnee truly embodies the spirit of Vox’s ‘hidden heroes’ – she works tirelessly behind the scenes, supporting managers and staff across the business with insightful BI reports and data-driven solutions that make our jobs significantly easier. Charnee is also always an absolute pleasure to deal with. Whenever I reach out for assistance, she is approachable, professional, responsive and consistently willing to go the extra mile to help.”
Those who know her agree that Charnee delivers exceptional support, helping to make a meaningful impact within the business every day.
From Chauffeuring People to Project Management
Charnee’s route into being a ‘technology wrangler’ wasn’t linear. Straight after school, she took a job as a driver at a membership chauffeuring company, and then, within only a month, she found herself managing its small operations team.
She explains: “Membership chauffeuring was a service offered to people who went out socially to have a couple of drinks and then didn’t want to drink and drive back home. The company I worked for would organise people to come to fetch them and take them home, working as a two-person team with one person driving the client’s car, and a second person being the back-up driver when they had been safely dropped off. So I started out as one of the drivers and then moved into being a manager and coordinating all those trips for the night.”
It can’t always have been easy, and the fact that she got this job as a young person just out of school shows a level of maturity beyond her years. This sort of early responsibility would later become a pattern: Charnee showed that she could handle people‑centred problems easily, efficiently and diplomatically, and senior people noticed.
From there she moved, after a solid three years on the job, into project administration at a company that implemented transport management software, from which she was once again promoted to project management not long after joining. She also moved to Joburg to take on this new job. She outlines: “We assisted people who, for example, had a fleet of trucks delivering cargo. The system then assists with managing those vehicles and the cargo.”
The role was going to introduce her to systems, senior level clients who could sometimes be challenging, and the sort of structured problem‑solving that sits at the heart of BI work, which she encountered later in her career when she joined Vox four and a half years ago.
She says modestly of those early career moves: “I was just doing my thing!” but she’s underplaying her genuinely likeable and warm personality that’s clearly sprinkled with a large dose of being a strong person who’s comfortable while embracing responsibility: “So if I do face a challenge, I deal with it, I get over it and I move on,” she says firmly.
She was also unafraid to move once again back to Cape Town when she originally started at Vox, showcasing her mindset of doing what it takes to simply get stuck into the requirements of the job: “Nothing is ever done in a straight line, and whoever thinks anything can be done in a straight line needs to have everything reassessed in their life!” she smiles.
Problem Solving and Pragmatic Learning
Charnee’s learning path at Vox has been very practical, with most of her skillset being acquired on the job. She says that she’s still learning at Vox and is currently studying a coding language used to automate tasks on servers so that people don’t have to do them by hand. She’s interested in anything that helps to keep reports fresh and reduces repetitive maintenance tasks.
Curiosity and variety are clearly motivating factors. “I love doing new things. I get bored,” she says. That appetite for novelty makes BI a good fit: every new report or data problem has its own shape, and working out how to join the dots is a satisfying puzzle. “Having to figure out something new,” she adds, “that’s what I most enjoy!”
There’s also a people side to the job that she values, because a well‑designed report can save time and prompt action. “I find it truly satisfying when one of my colleagues is really excited about a report that I’ve given them, and I know that it’s going to make their life easier,” she says.
Freedom and Adventures: The Horse Whisperer
Charnee grew up partly in the Western Cape, spending time in the Melkbosstrand area, and she and her family moved around South Africa at different stages while she was at school. She’s lived in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg at different times, and she loves the beach.
Charnee says of her teenage years: “I had a lot of freedom when I was when I was younger,” and she clearly enjoyed this aspect of her youth and getting to grips with being independent from an early age. She got a 125cc motorbike when she turned 16 and using it a lot to get around, explaining: “It was just convenient at that point because my mom was working, so if I needed to get to school or go to the shops or other places, I was sorted.”
She also owned a horse in her teens: a bay thoroughbred named Tiger Patrol, whom she called simply ‘Tiger’.
She describes him as a ‘gentle giant, former racetrack horse’ and she loved riding him on the beach. Riding without a saddle wasn’t a problem either: “He was a teddy bear,” she remembers fondly.
When she was younger, she also earned KwaZulu-Natal colours in hockey as a goalkeeper, which underscores again her innate physical and mental strength: “People hate being goalie, and the other hockey players hate the goalies!” she laughs.
Today, her other hobbies include being a PlayStation 5 gamer – “But I prefer solo play rather than playing online”- and diamond art painting, a craft hobby where tiny resin diamonds, also called drills, are placed onto a specially printed adhesive canvas to create a sparkling picture.
She’s also a certified open‑water diver, although she doesn’t currently dive, and enjoyed snorkelling in the Maldives on a previous holiday.
Charnee has been with her wife for ten years; they married in January 2019, on the beach, and have a son together who’s now in primary school. “As a family, we keep a fairly low profile on social media: we scroll, but we don’t post!” she smiles. They moved from Cape Town back to Joburg when their son was small, and so this this might be Charnee’s last big move for a while, but you never know what the future will hold!
For now, she’s content to explore hobbies closer to home, and to keep a wish list of things she’d like to do in the future: “I would love to take a family trip to Disney World in Florida,” she says.
Charnee’s story reminds us about the people who are rarely in the headlines but who help to keep things running and quietly make life easier for their colleagues.
There’s a running theme in her life about being quietly effective: the person who turns up, takes on the awkward client or situation that needs direction, and simply gets the work done. She helps to provide easily understandable information and direction for colleagues who need clean, readable data to make decisions.
And she continues to enjoy learning new things, getting to grips with new challenges and solving problems, and is grateful that Vox offers all of these possibilities in her work.
As she put it simply: “I love doing new things and also helping people.” As one of life’s quietly capable, always kind people, she and her work are helping her colleagues to keep the business moving forward, one readable and beautifully crafted Business Intelligence report at a time.
About Author
