Petra Mengelt is the Head of B2B Business Relations for Mash Group Plc, one of Europe’s largest fintech companies. Between the 7th and 10th of October 2019, Petra will join 70+ expert speakers at Customer Contact Week Europe, the European flagship for the world’s largest customer contact event series. There, Petra will share a case study detailing how you can drive employee engagement in your customer contact organisation and will also join the judging panel for the first ever CCW Europe Excellence Awards. Below, we ask Petra some questions about her work in customer contact and involvement in event.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career in the customer contact industry?

I am passionate about customer experience and interaction, and I always have been throughout my career. The customer journey through our business is a critical element of success and is only gaining importance as ever-more of our work is happening online and digitally. In a 24/7 multi-channel business world the customer service and experience demands grow year-on-year in new and exciting directions, and rising to meet this challenge will be a key success metric in the 2020’s and beyond. I am excited to be involved in the forefront of customer experience and to facilitate the ongoing revolutionary changes happening in our industry today.  

What makes you passionate about work in this industry?

In Fintech, success is to know your business and your customers.  By understanding the customer journey and being able to flexibly adapt our methods to the customer’s needs and desires at any time of day, all year around, we are able to make the customer’s journey effortless and the experience is smooth and seamless. Customers who receive the service they want with minimal turbulence become repeat customers. Creating a satisfied customer means we have likely created a repeat customer.    

What is your involvement at CCW Europe 2019? 

I plan to talk about the synergistic power of employee engagement in the diverse, motivated, and dynamic working environment of today. The value that a company can obtain by leveraging its key asset – people and employees – in the modern and future work environment cannot be overstated, and the modern agile company must see diversity as a source of strength, innovation, and ideas which allows it to grow, adapt, and thrive in an ever-closer and more connected world.   

What do you believe defines customer contact in 2019?

2019 and beyond will only see increasing trends favouring companies with a flexible, multichannel approach to interacting with our customers and meeting their needs and delivering services they demand.

What transformation initiatives is Mash Group PLC customer contact centre currently undergoing to address this?

Customers want to have their service when and where they need it. It’s not enough to be available to them on traditional banker’s hours of 9-3 Monday to Friday. We must be ready for multichannel contacts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to meet their expectations and needs. 

What are the key challenges that you are facing on this journey?

Keeping focus on the fundamentals while learning anew each day, a combination of traditional business ethic of “keeping your eye on the ball” while also tracking trending products and services. Retaining satisfied and engaged employees and ensuring full buy-in on our goals and processes, making sure that they know the rules of the game: what are our success metrics, how do we measure them, what’s our goal, and how do we attain it. These traditional goals of a successful business are now all-the-more important as we move further into a digitalized world, where new trends arrive in an accelerating loop. Things move fast…we need to be positioned for an ever changing world.

Why are events like CCW Europe 2019 important for industry professionals and what can they expect to take away?

As our world becomes more integrated, the value of industry conferences and meetings of top talents becomes a more-critical means of sharing knowledge, developing strategies, and returning to our respective firms excited to apply new techniques, technologies, and practices to our organizations. And it cannot be emphasized deeply enough that even in a world of increasing digitalization, the value of face-to-face workshops and events like CCW Europe cannot be understated.  

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