My Resume Flashcards
Please tell me something about yourself.
I am an innovative marketing professional with solid experiences in managing small to large scale projects within international business environments.
I am passionate about designing and delivering excellent services. And this, in combination with an entrepreneur mindset is the foundation of my work.
My analytical and creative way of thinking in combination with a hands-on mentality and the flexibility to interact with people from different cultures effortlessly:
- helps me to convince people about new ideas
- allows me to deliver projects to my stakeholders’ fullest satisfaction
- and brings the value that I am able to fix priorities autonomously
What are your personal strengths?
- Analytical and creative way of thinking
- Structured work style
- Hands-on mentality
- And my flexibility to work with people from different backgrounds and cultures
Start of professional career 2001 - 05/2005
As you may have seen from my resume, I started my professional career in 2001 within the luxury hotel industry where I held several positions in 5* hotels.
During this 4 years I had the pleasure to serve many high profile clients with many different backgrounds, such as politicans, successful entrepreneurs, celebrities or wealthy families.
And what I had learned during this time is, that these people value honesty and want to be treated “normally”. Like you would treat anyone else - without any chichi or so.
05/2005 - 01/2007 Assistant Banquetting & Catering Manager
During the off-seasons, I supported the Swissotel Le Plaza Basel during the Swiss Indoors and Watch & Jewelry fairs. As a result of doing a great job, I was offered to take on a Chef de Service role at the Swissotel in 2005.
In this position, I developed my leadership qualities, and proved my strong planning skills and my ability to work under pressure, and in turn was promoted in 2006 into the Assistant Managers position. In this new role I was responsible for the operational management of an own catering outlet, including staff planning, room-set up and leading events up to 1000 guests.
02/2007 - 06/2007 Zulassungsstudium
07/2007 - 07/2009 Event Sales Coordinator
09/2009 - 09/2010 Freelancer
However, during my years in the Swissotel I recognized that I need to develop my understanding of business administration when I want to progress further in my career.
Therefore, I decided in 2007 to prepare myself for the business school’s admission examination and to switch from the operational event business into the administrational event business, in order to start with the extra occupational diploma study after passing the exam.
And I must say; this decision was one of the best ones in my life. Because, it enabled me
- to apply my learning from Business school in the private sector as a freelancer in 2009, where I developed my entrepreneur skills further
- to delve deeper into the topic of services marketing
- and to join RMS as a client service coordinator in late 2010
2010 - 2013 Client Service Coordinator + FH Studium
In the role of the Client Service Coordinator I was, literally spoken a general servant. I was a gatekeeper, tech wizard, event manager and marketing expert. In addition to my job, I completed business school successfully and decided in 2012 to start with the bachelors degree.
Thanks to my hands-on mentality, proactivity and my ability to build relationships effortlessy I earned the trust of interdisciplinary colleagues and of the client services management. Due to this and due to my willingness to go the extra-mile every day I was promoted to lead the global service marketing project “Voice of Customer” in 2013.
2013 - 2014 Project Manager CEM
In this role my general responsibility was to design and implement a program that brings the voice of the customer into RMS’ service organization and included
- the definition of the project strategie and its objects in collaboration with senior management
- the conception, planning and execution of targeted improvement initiatives
- the creation of CR;M based dashboards and monthly reports
- the development of best practices and establishments of trainings
- the research and analysis of key insights from a variety of sources
Unfortunately, this summer the management decided to stop this project due to the delay of the new product RMS originally wanted to launch in early 2014, and now will not be launched before end 2015. So my role was made redundant.
However…I see this as chance to move on and for taking on new responsibilities. In particular, since I must say that I achieved a lot in within the period of 1 year…
Retroperspective success
…Retroperspectively, I can say that I achieved a lot in within the period of 1 year:
- I analysed the existing tools and subsequently designed and relaunched the direct support survey and implemented a second professional services survey
- I created stakeholder relevant dashboards which are CRM based and automatically show real-time survey data and further client specific data (such as client regional locations, response rates, service preferences based on region)
- I collected valuable feedback during client workshops what helped to enhance the design of the newly launched web service page. Based on the feedback that was collected, clients adopted this new way of service very well. Today approx. 650 clients per month accessing the webservice and are using the stored information for minor incidents, or submitting their requests through this page.
- I implemented a more client friendly complaint management process that ensures that also the account managers are aware of complaints and can take action
- I implemented Best Practices for the support agents and executed a charity initiative in order to increase the survey response rates to a minimum level of 10%. Based on the notification from a good colleague of mine I received in October, the combination of both was a tremendous success because the rates went up to 20% in within 4 months and made me very proud
- and last but not least, in regard to my bachelors thesis, I ran a customer journey study and investigated how my three probands perceive their journey through RMS Client Service Division and in turn which implications their experiences have for improving the service offerings
CSS Division
Since the structure of the Client Service Organization may be a bit confusing, let me explain it a bit in detail:
- In total the CSS organization employs about 100 employees who are serving their clients from 5 service hubs following the “Follow the sun principle”: India, Zurich, London, New York and San Francisco
- Further, the Organization is spread into two client facing teams, Client Support and Account Management, and a backoffice team, called Service Operations
- My position was located in within the service operations team, which consisted of 5 experts plus 1 Manager, my team and my manager were located in different locations in the US
Weakness 1
As you know I started my professional career in the luxury industry. What means my main responsibilities were related to people.
When I moved into the Coordinator role, I recognized after a certain time, that I sometimes miss to spot typos or that I missed to apply the same fonts style or font size. I already achieved a 99.9% success rate, but this 1 promille is still annoying.
In order to optimize this, I created a plan with my coach which is:
- switching the perspectives
- using the software Grammarly for english language documents
- applying the 4-eyes principle for important documents
- and I must say, since I follow this plan I feel good
Weakness 2
- A second weakness of mine is that I do not like repetitive tasks. But I know that every job holds repetitive tasks. So, in order to beat this issue I apply three tricks:
- doing unfavoured task at first - so they are done
- motivating myself with a goodie, what mainly is telling myself that if you have done this, you can start with an exciting task
- changing my attitude in terms of the task by telling myself, that the task is important for someone else
Weakness 3
- My basic French and Italian vocabulary. In particular I would love to improve my french language skills. Because what I learned during the time I live here in Switzerland is that it is easier to connect with people when speaking their language. Unfortunately, the past years I haven’t had the time to improve these skills. But I am more than happy to do so in 2015.
