Meet Carly Taylor - Director of Growth and Customer Experience

With nearly 20 years' experience across background checks and aviation identity management, Carly Taylor understands the pressures regulated organisations face when compliance, identity and onboarding processes need to work properly.

Carly is Director of Growth and Customer Experience at IDGateway, where she leads the sales, marketing, and support teams. Having been in her role for nearly six years, she brings together commercial strategy, product knowledge, client relationships, and team leadership.

Her work sits close to both the people using IDGateway's products and the teams helping to deliver them. That means understanding what clients need, what pressures they are under, and how technology can help make complex processes easier to manage.

We spoke to Carly about customer experience, changing client expectations, and why solving the right problem always starts with listening.

Q: Can you introduce yourself and your role at IDGateway?

CT: I’m Carly Taylor, Director of Growth and Customer Experience at IDGateway.

Essentially, my role looks after our sales team, marketing team, and support team. I manage a lot of the strategy, and it is a little bit of a mixed day-to-day, but it involves the leadership side of things and giving the team exactly what they need so they can give the best experience to our customers.

 

Q: What do you enjoy most about your role?

CT: Every day at IDGateway is very enjoyable, but what I really enjoy most is solving problems for clients.

I truly couldn’t do that without the fantastic team that we have at IDGateway. They really make the job incredibly easy, understanding the client’s needs.

We really like to get to know the client, so we understand what they require from our products, how we can help them, and then build that trust and good relationship between the two.

Q: You have lots of experience in this industry, what keeps you motivated?

CT: I’ve been doing this role for quite a long time now, probably coming up to about six years, but in vetting itself, I’ve been doing background checks and understanding aviation background checks in particular for nearly 20 years.

What really motivates me is when I can have a conversation with a customer and they come back to me to say, “I never knew how I managed without having one of your products before.”

That really tells us that those manual processes they were originally working with have completely disappeared. Now they have a software tool that manages it, and they can’t imagine a day without it.

That really, really motivates me. I think it also helps motivate a lot of the team in understanding how they can actually meet the needs of the clients.

Q: What do customers usually need help with when they first come to IDGateway?

CT: It’s a really good question. I often find that it’s triggered by something.

Often customers will come to us because perhaps they’ve just recently had an audit and they need to be more compliant. Perhaps they’ve got a pinch in resource, or they’re trying to get candidates completed within a certain amount of time.

What they’re looking for is software that can compliantly look at the applicant data. It can do it in an efficient manner and also be audit ready. That is definitely what the IDGateway products do.

Q: What has changed in customer expectations over the last few years?

CT: Quite a bit.

Traditionally, we were seeing that clients were coming to us because they had difficult manual processes. They were using Excel spreadsheets. They were using Outlook, and they weren’t quite sure how to merge that process.

But nowadays, a lot of people have moved on to software tools and technology. A lot of our clients will see that their managers, or their head office, are asking them to combine all of these technologies.

What I’ve seen change really is how to connect those software tools. Using often an API or an integration, you can connect your recruitment software, your HR software, your vetting software and your ID pass management software.

You can make sure that all of them work seamlessly together. It takes away the fact that you’re logging into multiple platforms and therefore having to remember lots of passwords.

The biggest thing that has changed is definitely people moving towards integrating technology.

Q: What are you most proud of at IDGateway?

CT: That’s a really easy one to answer. It’s the team.

Simply, without them, we couldn’t function as a business. We have built a fantastic environment for everyone to work in.

Being able to lead them and guide them and give them the tools that they need daily to be able to do their job, is such a passion of mine.

I really genuinely think that the customer experience that everyone receives is as a result of the fantastic team that we have at IDGateway.

Q: What is something people might not know about you?

CT: People may not know that I used to be cabin crew for BMI many years ago, which used to be called British Midland.

As a result, I love to travel. I was 19 at the time, starting my travelling around the world, and it really was a bug of mine.

Recently, I’ve been to Norway, which has actually got me into a lot of hiking. So, I probably will start doing a lot of that.

Walking up mountains is probably something people don’t know about me !

Final thoughts

What comes through clearly from Carly is that a good customer experience is not just about having the right technology. It starts with understanding the pressure clients are under, the problems they need to solve, and the support they need to make change feel manageable.

For Carly, the work is ultimately about people. IDGateway’s approach is human-centred: supporting clients with empathy, giving teams the tools they need to do their best work, and building trust through technology that makes complex processes easier.

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