Our Head of Regional Markets, Adnaan Adams, celebrates his 20th year as part of the Digi Family!
Tell us about your Digi journey.
I started in the Call Service Center (CSC) as a Proc-cyber agent dealing mainly with deposit and Cash-in queries from USA players. These queries were often from irate players, however, dealing with them taught me how to manage the player’s expectations while ensuring that their experience was as smooth and effective as possible.
From there I moved on to Team Leadership and then Shift Management. After doing this for a short while I moved on to Customer Service Management for the USA Call Centre, which was the biggest call center during my stint in the CSC.
During this time, I worked alongside very talented Retention Market managers who taught me about Player Acquisition and Retention, as well as the wonderful world of Online Marketing. I started exploring the domain of Outbound Sales marketing which helped me later in my career at Digi when I moved over to the Digitech space.
Straight after call center management I moved into the Risk and Fraud space, becoming heavily involved in the ecommerce world of the online gaming business. It turned out that this was the best time to do so, as in many respects, the online gaming industry was leading the charge when it came to ecommerce management strategies.
As the business grew, opportunities emerged to become involved in Global Operations Management. This was when I started working with every part of the online gaming business as the need at the time was to get the business to scale out and continuously grow to handle more and more projects and initiatives.
It was at this time that I decided to move over to the Digitech space as a Senior Product Owner for business systems with a specific focus on Outbound Call Centres. This was an exciting time during my career and was hugely rewarding. We managed to build slick, internal, bespoke products that allowed us to tackle the outbound expectations of converting players and getting them to make more deposits, which we were very successful in doing!
Product Ownership was a new concept at that time and establishing that capability in the organization was the next big opportunity that came my way.
We managed to grow a team of 6 Product Owners to a team of more than 60 +, ranging from Jnr, Intermediate, and Snr POs with interesting opportunities to introduce Product Management as a capability as well.
I was fortunate enough to also be given the opportunity to introduce Project Management and Business Analysis into the organization’s arsenal of capabilities.
While part of Digitech, I was responsible for the Product Management space that looked after the Affiliate Management, Customer Facing, Finance, Banking, Risk, Bulk Communication, Customer Service, IT and Infrastructure services and products. I was also responsible for the PMO, the Business Analysis team as well as the external product account management team which together formed part of the Delivery Department.
This wealth of experience has armed me with a 360-degree view of our business which I bring to my most recent appointment as Regional Head of Markets.
What brought you to Digi 20 years ago?
I was working in a call center, selling internet in a can called “yebo Net”, and the talk of the call centre world at the time was ForwardSlash (Now Digi).
It was and still is the best place to work and I wanted to get in come hell or high water. I managed to get my CV to the HR department and waited by the phone for a whole week before getting the call to come in for the interview. The rest is history!
Tell us why, 20 years later, you are still working at Digi.
Digi is family. We have grown together, and I have learnt so much over the past 20 years.
Also, I’m into weightlifting which means I eat up to 6 meals a day and Digi provides two free meals! This is a massive perk!
Having the opportunity to be part of the team required to execute on the SGHC strategy (to grow the revenue in as many markets as possible while maintaining the highest levels of compliance) is very exciting for me.
As a bonus I get to work alongside a talented team of well-established Market Development specialists affording me even more opportunity to grow and learn through the process of achieving our goals together.
Your career journey with Digi has been one of hard work, dedication, lots of learning and growth. What would you like people reading this interview to take away from your success at Digi?
Digi has so many great leaders! Kevin Kovarsky our CEO, Gary Pereira our Director of HR, Craig Hovey our CTO, Gerard Wallace, the head of Retention, and a team of highly specialized Portfolio Heads to name a few. All of them have amazing stories at Digi and incredible track records of success. Study, listen to, learn from, and engage them. Work out what your opportunity for success could be here at Digi and commit! Nothing comes for free, but well-planned hard work can be everyone’s superpower. Study your area and don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo and take a view on how things can be done better. If you are not waking up in the morning excited about what you are going to do that day, it’s time to find something new and interesting to get involved in.
Want to join our Digi family? Check out our current vacancies here: https://bit.ly/39nGt6W
