As long as you have a Knab heart

No two work days are ever the same for team leader Sarah Braun. Making plans, coordinating activities with other teams and recruiting new colleagues. She pays particular attention to whether a candidate has the Knab heart.

What does your work day look like?

There is no such thing as an average work day when you are the team leader of the Service Desk. My day generally starts out the same: a cup of coffee, catching up with my colleagues. I also check in with the shift leader – the operations manager – to see what the day will have in store. Then, I meet with the service experts (the team), recruit new colleagues, make plans for the new year and coordinate activities with other departments. We want the same team to be able to assist more customers. That may sound strange, but we are fully online, so we can only keep it personal by keeping the team as small as possible and focusing on automation and efficiency, without the customer missing the personal side of our service, because that is what we are so good at.

How do you, as a team leader, make sure the service department has the right energy?

That starts with recruiting new colleagues! You must have the “Knab heart”. That is difficult to explain, but it is a combination of a couple of factors. Everyone on our team enjoys helping customers, but they are also very ambitious. Providing service must be in your DNA, but you don’t need to come from the financial world. We will teach you that part.

Talent pool

We encourage everyone to further develop themselves and we are happy to help. Almost every department at Knab has someone who started out on the Service Desk. This also ensures that colleagues who build the website or improve processes actually know our customers. The mutual goal of helping our customers, developing yourself and being part of a friendly team ensures that we have created a pleasant working atmosphere with each other.

Growing and remaining personal

We are a fully online service, yet we still want to provide personal service. That is our strength. We explore where we can make things smarter and more efficient, such as helping customers via chat, which is now our main channel. In this way, a Service Expert can handle multiple conversations at a time and the customer receives help faster. What’s more, it is significantly easier for the customer to send a message than to make a phone call.

Another example is the process of becoming a customer. That takes practically no time at all via the Knab website, even though we have to conduct multiple checks on the backend. However, we have already automated some of those checks. Even here, we continually try to speed up processes and eliminate manual intervention where possible. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to work for our customers or interact with them. It means we want to focus more on helping our customers and learning more about and from them. Therefore, we are still personal and can accomplish our work with the same team, even if we gain more customers.