Melanie Wolf, Customer Service Manager

I can speak: 🇩🇪 German 🇬🇧 English 🇪🇸 Spanish 🇫🇷 French (I understand it, but I cannot speak it anymore)

I had never "actively" planned to become a Customer Service Manager; I actually studied Political Science and Socio-Ecological Economics and Policy in university. After graduation, I worked at a hotel in Ecuador, and I enjoyed working with the customers there and the “start-up” atmosphere that the hotel had. After I came back to Munich and I was looking for a job in a company that had a similar atmosphere. I came across Personio and looked into the different jobs they offered at the time. Customer Service Manager seemed like a great fit considering that I loved working in a team and directly with customers so I decided to apply.

If you look at my calendar, it is quite colorful 😄, which means days pass by quickly, and I never get bored.

We start the day with our Daily Stand-Up meeting. In this meeting, we get updates about important numbers from the previous day as well as any other important news. Then, I have a certain amount of shifts per day, for which we use Zendesk. Essentially, this means being available on the phone or answering incoming emails. After those shifts, I normally need more time to answer any open tickets questions I could not answer during my shift (so-called backlog time).

Currently, I am also a Buddy for a new colleague in our team. So, I spend roughly an hour per day with her, onboarding her as best and as quickly as I can. In addition, I do ‘service offers,’ which means, for example, doing multi-hour training about a certain topic for a specific customer. The rest of my week is filled with other meetings, like the Mentoring Program I am part of, and some additional projects like conceptualizing new processes.

I think the most Personio moment I’ve had was in February 2020, when we were able to spend two weeks at our Madrid office with our Spanish colleagues. The trip started with an adventure:

As a sustainable-friendly company, we wanted to give an example of how much the value of #SocialResponsibility matters to us even when it comes to company projects like this exchange. So, two colleagues and I decided to go by train to Madrid to reduce our carbon footprint. We took a 36-hour train ride through Germany, France, and Spain. It ended up being a really fun trip, getting to know my colleagues better as well as discovering new places on the way. In Madrid, we lived in a gorgeous place in the heart of the city. It was awesome to experience the city from a local’s perspective and not simply as a tourist. Overall, we had a lot of fun in and outside the office, and our Spanish colleagues even took the time to show us the city after work.

My favorite operating principles are #SolutionsOverProblems and #SeekToImprove. I like these two principles because they help me focus on what I can change, and where I can learn new things instead of on what is going wrong. For example, I remember in the beginning I was frustrated with more technical questions as I had no previous knowledge in this field. So I started using my yearly development budget for a course about basic programming skills to deal with these questions. Additionally, we are setting up further training sessions for colleagues in their onboarding phase, focused specifically on more technical issues that we face in our daily interactions with our customers.

I am somewhat of a perfectionist and can therefore struggle with situations where I do not feel 100% prepared but, it’s all about having a positive attitude and mindset. After all, there is (probably) no job in the world where I will know everything and do everything perfectly from the very beginning. The advice I would have liked to receive and especially embrace more would have been:

This sounds cheesy, but our current team is pretty ideal for me. This is another reason why I love working at Personio! We are always supporting and helping each other. We also laugh and joke a lot and don’t take ourselves too seriously. We hang out for lunch, but also after work or on the weekends. So, a lot of my colleagues have become my friends. Additionally, I appreciate that I can speak openly with our leaders about any issues that come up.

Would you like to be part of Melanie’s team?

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