In every company, there are a few gems, who work for the company from the very beginning and continue to pour the same level of passion and enthusiasm even after spending years and years in company’s service. In our first issue of eSewa’s people, we have someone who has spent almost a decade with the company: Sarita Karki. Even after spending almost a decade at eSewa, she comes to office each day with great passion and dedication for the company.
Sarita’s connection with F1Soft group of companies goes beyond eSewa. She first connected with F1Soft back in 2011 when the company did ticketing for an MLTR concert. Then, she became part of the data entry team when F1Soft was involved in digitizing files of Nepal Medical Council and finally joined eSewa as a receptionist-cum-customer support representative in 2012. Reminiscing her initial days at eSewa, she shares “Being of a shy nature, I used to be quiet nervous to go and talk to others. But, all the employees were very friendly and used to initiate conversation themselves making me feel very welcomed”.
From beginning as one of the first members of Customer Support Department (CSD) to starting Customer Relationship Management Department with her colleague Sanjida, she has had a long journey. In customer support department, they used to face a lot of problems being the first batch. While today we use several formats for reporting customer-related issues, at Sarita’s time, there were no formats and her team members are the ones who developed the formats that is used still today. Talking about this, she shares “Today’s new generation has a lot of advantage. They get to learn the organization’s work culture via a month long training, we didn’t have that privilege in our time. We used to be so busy that we had to eat lunch in our desk itself. I was so happy when we recruited more people in CSD and finally got to go outside for lunch and enjoy a breath of fresh air”.
While working in Customer Support Department, she became pregnant with her daughter and thus, had to take a maternity leave. After her return, she shifted to bank department where she got to further enhance her knowledge. She shares, “Working in bank department, I got the opportunity to learn new things related to reconciliations and bank-related transactions”. She was working at bank department for only a short time, when she decided to take a leave to take care of her daughter.
After a year, she rejoined eSewa and started Customer Relationship Department. Starting a whole new department with just one another team member was surely tough, she says “At the beginning, we had 1000+ Know Your Customer (KYC) verification requests. We worked tirelessly calling the customers, providing them information related to eSewa. It was not as easy as today, at the time, people didn’t have idea about eSewa and we had to start by explaining the basics. As phone was our only medium of communication, it was quiet tough and was not as easy as explaining face-to-face. KYC form was also difficult to navigate and we had to constantly follow-up customers. It took us quite a while to finally receive clear documents. We had so many requests, but so little manpower and I remember we were overjoyed when the two of us reviewed all the requests and saw “0” in the KYC request.”
Even after all these years, her thirst for knowledge hasn’t been quenched. She can be seen interacting with employees from other departments and asking questions about how certain things like re-targeting ads of digital marketing works. Lastly, she concludes by saying “the working culture, the team spirit and the work environment are the things that have made me stay in this organization for so long and more to come”.