Please find here the slides of our virtual event that took place on Tuesday November 30 as well as our survey results..

Please feel free to contact your competence manager in case of questions.

We are pleased to announce the arrival of Manu Bunkens who started beginning of November.
Manu is appointed Bid Director, reporting into Mike Hellemans.
He will be responsible for the daily operations of the Bid team,
focusing on the quality of our offers and improving the effectiveness
and maturity of the bid process. In his role he will facilitate the
collaboration between sales, pre-sales and delivery to optimize our
chances of winning new, profitable contracts and ensure a smooth
handover to the operational teams takes place for won contracts.
Manu has been active in servicing complex and demanding customers
in several industries and call-for-tender driven environments, such as
Serco, European institutions, Proximus etc. He has issued and
managed RFPs; responded to bids as a tenderer including managed
contracts as a service provider in both transition and in run mode.
Manu will work closely together with the Operational teams, Portfolio Managers and Sales.
Please join us in welcoming Manu and in wishing him a lot of success in his new role.

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 25^th 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.

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.

In an ever-changing business environment, the use of digital technologies is key to keep abreast of changing market trends, create new or modify existing business models and embrace organizational change.

The Econocom Belux digital roadmap identifies and prioritizes the main digital initiatives we are planning to undertake in the coming years to support our business objectives. The roadmap (downloadable in attachments) distinguishes short, medium and longer term initiatives for the period 2020-2022.

As indicated in the overview, each initiative in our digital roadmap is aligned with one or more of the key ambitions of our digital strategy:

	Optimize efficiency
	Reduce cost
	Improve quality
	Enforce compliance
	Ensure business continuity

We will keep you posted on the progress we are making though regular articles on this intranet.