Marking 27 years of customer service excellence: meet Chris

To many of our customers, Chris Haddock needs no introduction. Our Solutions Director has been advising people on how to get the most value from their solutions since he joined us from Sage, back in our earliest days.

This autumn, Chris celebrated 27 years working with Thinc – and we caught up with him for his reflections on an outstanding career.

Hi Chris! How did you first get into IT, and how did you wind up working for Thinc?

I left school when I was 15, and started to work on what was known as a Youth Training Scheme, or YTS. I started working for a Sage reseller in Sunderland – we were doing the majority of the support on Sage’s different products back then.

I did that for a few years, until one day I heard from a friend who mentioned that Sage was looking for people to recruit. So roughly at the age of 18, I applied and got a job for Sage in Newcastle. Initially this was in support, on what was a predecessor of Sage 200. I also did a bit in R&D, before going back to support, managing the team.

We had a customer called DCS, which would ultimately become Thinc. I knew the MD, Steve, though doing support calls for him. One day, he phoned and asked if I fancied moving south to work for him. I said no, as I hadn’t long bought my first house.

A little later, he asked me again. This time he drove up and took me out for a curry, and offered me a job. About a month later, I’d sold my house, packed up with my young family, and began the 225-mile journey to Letchworth, where we’ve been ever since. Well, it was a very good curry!

What’s been the most game-changing development in business technology you’ve seen during your career?

I know it sounds lame, but it has to be the internet. It was a gamechanger.

At the time, as well as supporting Sage products we were building and selling computers – Amstrad computers with twin 5¼ inch floppy drives, no hard drive. A hard-drive version would be £3.5k with 20MB. Today, your average photo needs more than that! I remember the days when if you needed to know something, you’d look in a book. Now, you can just whip out your phone and find the answer there.

Looking back at it now, the arrival of the internet felt very sudden. It changed communication software – prior to that we had things like Sage Chitchat, which was a bulletin board that you’d log into via a modem.

Of course, that’s still a million miles away from what we have now. But if you take the internet and the new media for communication, together they drove each other – you needed faster and faster speeds to be able to do what you needed to do.

What’s one thing that’s just as true for our clients today as it was when you started out?

What I’ve always tried to do is develop strong relationships with clients, whether I was on support calls at Sage or today working at Thinc. You’ve got to trust them and, more importantly, they have to trust you.

The one thing that’s never changed in all the years I’ve worked in IT is that you can still pick up the phone and talk to people. I think that, today, the value of this sometimes forgotten – it’s so easy to send an email or a Teams message.

It’s not a bad thing – don’t get me wrong – being able to contact people anywhere in the world, but you also need the verbal side of things.

I wouldn’t have developed the lasting relationships with clients if I’d just sent a few emails – we know each other’s faces and voices.

Your advice has been trusted by countless clients – but what’s been the biggest lesson you’ve you learned from them?

There are so many customers that have told me about their businesses so I could learn and then make recommendations as to how they should do things. You’ve got to know them personally to understand what they want. You’ve got to understand their business, what it wants and what it needs.

The best customer relationships, for me, are the ones whom where we can actually say ‘no’. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve challenged the customer on whether something they ask for is what they really need. It helps to build that trust so that when there’s something that I do think they really need, they understand we’re doing it for their benefit.

Some customers will tell us just to “get on and do it” rather than taking time going through things in detail, because the two-way relationship has been established. They trust us to do right by them.

At Thinc we’re proud of the depth of experience we have – 650 years across our team. But we also invest heavily in bringing young talent through. What’s your advice for any young professional looking for a career as long and successful as yours?

If you know what you want, don’t be afraid to go for it. But if you really want to achieve it, then you need to put the hours in.

When I left school, I knew what I wanted to do; I pushed hard to do it. I know from experience that to get to where you want to be, there’s a lot to do, a lot to learn. If you put that effort in, then you’ll get the rewards on the other side.

A life dedicated to IT, to your clients, your family – that probably hasn’t left time for much else, right?

I’ve always loved cars and bikes. Especially bikes. It’s probably because at a young age, my mum banned me from ever getting a motorbike – so, naturally, I planned to get one as soon as a I moved out.

I soon realised just how expensive buying a house was, and so put those plans on ice. But when I started earning a bit more money, the first thing I did was pass my test and go and buy a bike.

My wife and son were on holiday at the time and I hadn’t actually told her that I was getting one. I had to explain when she came back why there was a shiny new padlock on our shed. When I then wheeled out the lovely black Yamaha that was inside, well, I won’t repeat what she said.

The furthest it’s taken me was on a tour all the way to Marrakesh – it took seven days all round, travelling through Europe. I saw so many weird and wonderful things on my journey. Our tour was on sports bikes, which I couldn’t do now! I was younger and a lot more flexible then.

A word from Sage

Given Chris’s road began with Sage, we asked an old colleague and long-standing acquaintance of his – Nigel Platt, Partner Account Manager at Sage – for a few words on working with Chris.

“I had the pleasure of working Chris back in the early-mid 90s! I worked with him on Sage Sovereign Tech support, where he was the new kid on the block. From the start, he displayed fantastic qualities – a desire to learn, to succeed, and a thirst for knowledge mixed with a great personality and ‘want to help’ attitude. He was a pleasure to work with and was clearly destined for a fantastic career.

“When Chris joined DCS around 1997, it was sad to see him go, but he couldn’t have joined a better partner. It has been wonderful to see his career progress. Fast forward to 2024, it’s great to see the same qualities displayed in the early days of his career now coming to fruition at Thinc.”

Looking for a partner that’s in it for the long-haul?

Chris embodies so much of what we seek to do at Thinc. We’re committed to creating lasting relationships with our customers that help them achieve their ambitions and unlock the potential of their people. If you’re looking for a partner that blends technical knowhow with a focus on what matters most to you, then get in touch.