This is my story
I grew up in Switzerland in a suburb of the Swiss capital Bern. My father was a self-employed hairdresser with his own hairdressing salon and around 10 employees at that time and my mother looked after us children. I have a twin brother and a sister 5 years younger. When I was 15, my parents divorced and we moved with my mother. This was a personally and financially difficult time for my mother, although she never let us feel it. Somehow she always made everything possible.
At 15, there comes a time when you have to decide whether to continue your education academically or do a vocational apprenticeship in Switzerland. Although I had very good grades, in view of the situation I wanted to stand on my own two feet as quickly as possible and decided on a commercial apprenticeship with a professional baccalaureate. Something that still helps me today, because I know what it means to have to work with bad tools in even worse processes.
I was already very curious at that time and wanted to change things. Which, fortunately, I was allowed to do. For example, I modernized the letter paper of the municipal administration where I did my apprenticeship and was one of the first to make intensive use of the possibilities of the then new electronic typewriters with line memory and then the first computers.
After the apprenticeship I changed to the Mobiliar insurance, at first to a general agency, where I was quickly allowed to take over a department management. I managed the office staff with 5 employees. Our tasks included contract processing and archiving. The archiving process was very time-consuming. I radically redesigned it. In addition to improving our service, we were able to massively reduce our costs.
When I was 21, I took some time off and went to New York for 4 months to the Drummers Collective, where I did an intensive drum study. This is the reason why today I often use examples from drumming and music in my presentations and my consulting engagements. This study showed me how much is possible within a very short time if you have the right attitude, the right tools and the best coaches.
Well, I decided against a professional music career because I already got my admission to a business college for my bachelor studies before coming to New York.
Consequently, my professional career continued in a good civil manner. I studied business administration part-time with a focus on finance and accounting. But my real interest was in change and process optimization. My bachelor thesis was then also about activity-based costing. In the end, I received the award for the best overall examination.
My professional career in employment was then shaped by the market liberalizations in Switzerland over the past decades. I was in the insurance industry when this market was liberalized and, among other things, helped to build up a new service center, introduce new insurance products and optimize processes. Since I was always moving between business and IT during this time, I did a master’s degree in Business Information Management and moved to Swisscom during the telecom market liberalization. I played a major role in redesigning Customer Care to make it more customer and service-oriented.
A few years later, the electricity market was to be liberalized and I went to BKW Energie AG, the third-largest electricity company in Switzerland, and was given the task of preparing customer service, including the service areas of the regional head offices, for market liberalization. I also completed my business informatics degree with honors during this time. The topic of the master’s thesis was the IT planning of the customer service center. This formed the basis for the organizational change. We redesigned customer service to be completely customer- and service-oriented, optimized processes and structures, and introduced a completely new service culture. The whole thing was supported by the latest IT applications such as IP telephony and CRM systems. For this work, I later received awards in Europe and internationally.
A western Swiss electricity group found the solutions so attractive that it entered into a joint venture with BKW and I was allowed to found and build up a new service company on behalf of the two groups.
I managed the service company for another 5 years as managing director. At 40, I needed a change. I felt that although I was allowed to do a lot of things, I was always stuck and I realized more and more clearly that the service theme was actually misunderstood and the potential that lies dormant in a consistent customer and service orientation was not being used.
Service is more than just what follows marketing and sales. Especially since this is also wrong in terms of process.
It started to bother me more and more I realized on the one hand how I was burning out and on the other hand that I wanted to change that. I had found my calling.
I quit my job, was employed for another year as a member of the management board and delivery manager at an IT company, and at the same time built up my self-employment. In 2012, I founded “The Black Elephant” together with my wife and now we help companies to become service champions in their industry through customer and service orientation, while at the same time massively reducing their costs.
My own experience and the study of the most successful and customer-oriented companies in the world have shown me that customer delight and profit maximization are not contradictory, but rather mutually beneficial.
Even Henry Ford knew that “A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” More and more companies are looking for ways to consistently put the customer at the center of their decisions. After all, intensified competition and declining customer loyalty are a fact of life in virtually every industry today. The customer economy, in which only genuine customer companies will survive in the future, is becoming a reality.
