Interim Management at a Rapidly Growing Scale-up

Our interim team leader, Mike ter Hoeven, successfully completed an exciting assignment at Toelevering Online over the past six months. In this case study, we share his experiences and how he accomplished the mission successfully.

In conversation with Toelevering Online

Toelevering Online is a lightning-fast ordering platform where one can order wooden, plastic, or aluminium frames in the Netherlands and Belgium. The ordering platform is user-friendly, and questions about orders or product information can also be easily accessed via the website. Didn't find what you were looking for? Then customers reach the customer contact centre. Toelevering Online is a Scale-up company and has grown rapidly in recent times. As a result, the customer contact centre has also expanded, creating a need to set it up sustainably and future-proof. The main task for Mike as interim team leader was to form the customer contact team and really make it a team. Also, to reduce waiting times and achieve efficiency through process and system optimisation.

"We aim to create a harmonious team that handles customer queries efficiently and is scalable for the future" –

Marthijn Wolters, Manager Operations, Toelevering Online

An Ambitious Assignment with Three Main Themes: People, Process & System.

The emphasis was mainly on the people aspect. The team was fairly recently formed and had been without a leader for some time. There was a need to gain more insight into everyone's talents and to allow the team to function more as a unit. By engaging with the employees and giving them genuine attention, they felt heard and seen.

Additionally, we looked at how processes and systems could be better organised so that the work ultimately became easier and more enjoyable.

More Room for Laughter, Qualified Customer Queries, and Shorter Queues.

Even though the organisation grew very quickly, Mike and his team ensured that the queues steadily decreased. Furthermore, working with the process manager ensured that processes were optimised. This created more room for a chat and a joke on the work floor, resulting in visibly higher employee satisfaction.

By qualifying customer contacts through a qualification system, it also became much easier for the organisation to see where operational challenges were occurring. This provided important insights necessary for optimising internal processes.