Hi Elke – You are now 3 months at Econocom.
Can you firstly introduce yourself – Who are you and what is your professional background?
On my 25th birthday, I started working as a Sales Coordinator at AC Systems in Hoegaarden. After one year and a first great experience, I decided to go back to Leuven and joined Belisol as a commercial assistant. Unfortunately, this function was not challenging enough and after only 4 months, I left the agency and got hired as a customer service agent at AB Inbev where I grew in competences and changed account portfolio several times.
AB Inbev is known for its many career opportunities and I happily took part in that. As a service-minded employee, I wanted to gain experience on the sales-side and after 2 years, I took up the position of Inside sales coordinator, the entry-level function for becoming an inside sales manager, where I was also able to acquire experiences in project management.
I became the key user for Belgium in developing the B2B-webshop. After exactly 1 year, both Customer service department and the internal sales department merged into one big Customer Experience team. For me this was the best of both worlds and also a strategy that I supported a lot. In this new structure, I got promoted to Customer Experience Digital and B2B Lead (what’s in a name) and automating order processes and developing & improving the Belgian webshop became my key responsibilities. As the website grew and became a topic treated on zone-level, my function became somehow redundant and although there were other team lead functions within the Customer experience, I decided so spread my wings and fly to Econocom.
At a certain moment in your career you decide to change jobs – What has triggered you to join Econocom?
It was the job content and the flat structure within the organization that convinced me to join this team. As from the first interview with Pascal Verpport, I was pretty clear that the current internal sales team has many more responsibilities than order taking and follow up. They are the SPOC for our customers and take the lead in activating other stakeholders to resolve the demands of these customers. I was informed about the many opportunities for improvement and creating efficiencies and this gives me tons of energy.
The function of internal sales manager is a perfect mix of my mission from the beginning of my professional career: make every customer experience outstanding!
You have joined Econocom in challenging times – How have you experienced your first 3 months?
They say it’s not easy to be onboarded in a new company during these covid times. Although it might not be ideal and of course I wish I could meet my whole team all together in real life, I feel that we manage around pretty well. They and all other colleagues gave me a warm welcome in the Econocom family. I was lucky to be able to go to the office sometimes to meet people face to face.
As a newcomer seeking for efficiencies, it was a great experience to take the jump after only having a rather limited onboarding scheme. This might sound negative, but in fact I experienced it as something good, because it enabled me to find out processes myself and to rethink them were needed.
I know it is not a long time – 3 months, but what are you proud of in terms of realizations so far?
I am very proud of what the internal sales team and I achieved together in these 3 months. By tracking the major part of the workload via a new reporting, I try to find a balance in workload for all internal sales B2B agents. We went live with a new telephony system, we have set a clear back-up system, we are continuously improving our ticketing system and we are mapping our processes via a RACI. You can compare us to a tandem, where I guide the way, but only together we can gain a top speed. It’s the team that does all the hard work and reduces the backlog in tickets. It’s the team that has an open mindset and they are supportive in developing our hybrid structure. It’s the team taking care of our customers.
Where do you see your and your teams’ biggest challenges in the future?
The biggest challenge we already face right now, is the shortage of devices and accessories which helps growing the amount of backorders. This has a direct impact on the customer experience. Although it’s not always the most pleasant message to give to the customer, it is up to us to make these contacts outstanding ones.
The other main opportunity is our current tooling package. We are working on improvements and the first meetings for the new ERP systems are marked as done. In 2022 we will go live with a new system which will allow us to reduce manual workload to follow up customer processes from A to Z. There’s still a challenging year lying ahead of us and I am fully convinced that together we can have nothing but happy customers and stakeholders, who will see Econocom as their preferred partner for digitalization.