Towards a customer-driven culture

The development of customer relations and sales culture is a part of Hansel’s strategy, and during 2017, the majority of Hansel employees participated in training promoting a customer-driven operating culture. The purpose of the training was to highlight the importance of our customer relations and to improve the understanding of each employee’s role in creating a customer experience.

“The purpose of the training was to deepen our relationship with our customers and to make the participants think about their work in terms of the benefits we offer to our customers. Customer satisfaction is an important KPI for us, and the score can be high only if we are able to identify customers’ needs increasingly better and optimise what we offer to each customer”, says Account Manager Petri Kalavainen.

The training was held for those Hansel employees who are in regular contact with suppliers and customers, such as account managers, consultants, category managers, and customer service representatives. In organising the programme, Hansel partnered with Aalto University Executive Education.

“Promoting a sales-driven approach creates results, as we have seen through the immense increase in the turnover for expert services over the last five years. Although our aim is not to generate financial profit, it is nonetheless important that our business operations grow and that we are able to offer our know-how to customers to as great an extent as possible. This makes public procurement activities more effective and improves their quality”, Kalavainen continues.

During the training, all participants met customers and asked them about things such as the functionality of their current procurement model and possible changes to the organisation of procurement activities. They also found out about procurement-related concerns and customers’ wishes regarding Hansel and their cooperation. The results of the training will be utilised in Hansel’s segmentation work, refinement of current customer relations, and finding of opportunities with potential customers.