Implementation Consultant

A Bit About Smartly, a Datacom Company

We exist to make it simpler for Kiwi businesses to look after their people. We're known as the simple way to sort your payroll for over 20,000 businesses. Our slick software combined with our awesome support team help businesses pay their people on time, accurately and in line with legislation. As a fast-growing FinTech expanding into adjacent markets, Smartly offers a fast paced, fun work environment with great opportunities for personal and professional development.

About the Role

As an Implementation Consultant, you'll take new Smartly customers from sign-up through to their first successful pay run — the moment their payroll actually works and they start getting real value from us. You'll own that journey end to end: understanding how their business and payroll work, configuring Smartly to fit, migrating and validating their employee and payroll data, testing, and guiding them through go-live.

For our smaller customers you'll be the single point of contact through the whole implementation, owning both the relationship and the technical work. On larger or more complex customers you'll partner with a Service Delivery colleague to get them live. Either way, the job is to do whatever it takes to get each customer to a confident first pay run, as quickly and smoothly as possible.

We have a dedicated training team, but the best implementations don't leave enablement to a session at the end. You should be comfortable showing customers how to use the product, and at times guiding them through a first pay or parallel pay. You don't need to be a professional trainer — but you do need to be comfortable teaching.

This role sits in our Activation team, part of Go-to-Market. It's a genuinely hands-on role for someone who enjoys combining technical problem-solving with customer relationships, and there's room to grow into more complex, higher-value implementations as our model develops.

Ideally you'll be based in Wellington — our implementation and service delivery teams are at our Lower Hutt head office, and it's the fastest way to learn Smartly and the payroll domain. We'll consider Auckland-based candidates too; once you're up to speed, the role runs largely online with your customers. We like to bring people together in person when we can, but we're mindful of the benefits of working from home for work/life balance.

What you'll do

•         Own end-to-end customer implementations, from kick-off through configuration and data migration to a successful first pay run

•         Diagnose each customer's payroll and business-process requirements, and configure Smartly to fit their context

•         Map, migrate, validate and reconcile employee and payroll data — including complex data like leave balances and historical entitlements — so it's accurate before go-live

•         Guide customers through each step of a multi-step setup, showing them how to use the product as you go so they're confident well before go-live

•         Run customers through a first pay or parallel pay against their existing system

•         Test and troubleshoot the configured system; document and escalate technical issues to our Product and integration teams

•         Own the customer relationship through implementation — proactive communication, clear expectations, and a confident, professional partner throughout

•         Keep several implementations moving at once without dropping anything, with accurate records of progress

•         Spot friction in the implementation journey and help fix it, contributing to repeatable configuration and migration approaches, standards and playbooks

•         Work closely with Service Delivery, Training, Product, Support and Sales to deliver a seamless customer experience

•         Handle sensitive customer and employee data securely and in line with privacy requirements

We're a pretty agile company, and are keen to respond to customer, technology and internal stakeholders' changing requirements — this can mean we evolve in our roles to meet those needs.

What you'll bring

Essential:

•         Around 2+ years' proven, hands-on experience owning end-to-end software, SaaS or business-process implementations or customer onboarding — taking a customer from kick-off through configuration and data migration to go-live. We're open on industry; it's the end-to-end ownership we care about

•         Hands-on system configuration and customer data migration, with accurate, methodical handling of customer data

•         Strong problem-solving and analytical skills — able to understand requirements, configure a system to fit, troubleshoot issues and know when to escalate

•         Project-management aptitude — able to guide a customer through a multi-step setup to go-live and manage several implementations concurrently

•         Excellent verbal and written communication, including the ability to explain technical steps clearly to non-technical customers

•         Comfortable teaching live — walking a customer through the product on a screen-share, fielding questions on the fly, and coaching them through a live first pay or parallel pay

•         Strong planning, organisational and time management capabilities

•         A customer-first mindset with a focus on getting customers to value quickly

•         Energetic, adaptable and calm under pressure; works collaboratively in a small team

•         A relevant tertiary qualification (bachelor's degree in business, information systems, technology or a related discipline)

Nice to have:

•         Payroll, HRIS, workforce management or payroll process knowledge — a real advantage in our world, though it is learnable and we weight it below proven implementation experience

•         Experience migrating complex employee or payroll data, including balances and historical records

•         Exposure to both low-touch self-service onboarding and complex, high-touch customer implementations

•         Experience driving process improvement or implementation journey optimisation

•         Formal training design, enablement or change management experience

•         Familiarity with CRM and customer onboarding platforms such as HubSpot

Why you'll like it here

•         End-to-end ownership of customer implementation

•         Contribution to the redesign and continuous improvement of how customers get to value

•         Room to grow into more complex, higher-value implementations as the model develops