Tim:
Hi and welcome everyone to our next episode of the CX Coffee Chat. I’m Tim, Global Business Director at Concentrix. And today we are here with Engy, previously head of customer experience at WorkMotion, but congrats are in order because you are now Director of Operations. Welcome Engy.
Engy:
Welcome, Tim. How are you? And thank you.
Tim:
I’m very, I’m very good. Thanks for joining us for, for everyone who is not familiar with WorkMotion. WorkMotion is actually one of my favorite startups out there because they are Berlin-based and Berlin-founded. So, from Germany, they are a human resource platform that allows companies to remotely hire and onboard employees. I mean, they are so much more, but that is a core function of the startup. And yeah, they are very, very competing, very strong in a very, very competitive environment with the likes of Remote and Deel, Oyster, you name them. So, Engy, maybe over to you a quick introduction and then we’ll start this.
Engy:
Yes, so hello everyone. I’m very happy to be here with you today. So I’m the Director of Operations at WorkMotion and I’m based in Alexandria, Egypt, right? So by the sea coast. And when I’m not working at WorkMotion, I’m actually a proud mom of two kids. And it’s a real pleasure to share my story here and how we work in WorkMotion. I think it’s very important to raise some things, right, and to highlight also the importance of working remotely. I mean, the best part about WorkMotion is that for me, for example, like I live and breathe it because it’s also solving my issues as an Egyptian person who didn’t have a chance to working remotely before. I didn’t have the chance to even apply. And now I have this chance, right? And I’m very, very grateful. And at the same time, I’m very passionate about it.
And I get super duper excited when the talents, you know, when we hire talents like me and they say, and Engy, you and WorkMotion changed our lives. And I think this is the most important message that I have for today. Right. Either for talents or for clients, because also for the clients, because they will be able to, you know, remove all the boundaries. They can hire any skillset that they want wherever. Right. There is no boundaries anymore. So I’m very excited to share this experience with all of you today. So, yeah.
Tim:
Well. So maybe let’s start with that because in Concentrix we have also like 15 ,000 game-changers, so colleagues in Egypt. So, I know the country very well. I know a lot about the great talent pool, the high education, the language diversity. So.
How did it start? So how did you and the company make the decision in the past to really build your team in Egypt? And what are the core functionalities of the team? So why are you basically operating out of Egypt instead of out of Germany? And after that, we talk about the cultural effect.
Engy:
Yes. Okay. All right. So first of all, we are a big operations team, right? Some of our teams. So we’re not only located in Egypt, right? We have a lot of people everywhere. So we have people in Spain, people in Italy, in Greece, you know, we have people everywhere. Like I always say this whenever a new joiner comes in, you will love it because it’s multicultural. It’s crazy. You know, we have a lot of people and it’s a lot of like different things. Everyone celebrates different things, we have different opinions, of course, and everything. But for Egypt, we have a big pool as well, especially in the customer experience team, because it’s more of the generalized customer support team where they are the first tier, they are the first line supporters. So and of course, it’s easy to do it in English, right? So that is why we are hiring more in the CX role in Egypt, but we also have other roles where Egyptians are also there, right? Because… despite the fact of Egypt and the, let’s say, the denormalization part about it or the things that everyone thinks that they know about Egypt is that we ride horses or we ride camels and it’s all desert and it’s not the right thing at all. I mean, like you said, we have really good pool and at the same time, our prices are very competitive.
It’s not cheap, but at the same time we have really good quality and you can have the skill set. I mean we have the highest for example number of software engineers developers hired in Egypt by the way, not only from WorkMotion but also from our clients because they find the skill set that they want And also with competitive prices, right? They you know, the glossary in Egypt is also really good
So it’s not only in Egypt, that’s something that I wanted to highlight. We’re not only hiring from Egypt, but we have really good pool there. And I’m very proud of all the Egyptians that are working with us and everyone also, not just Egyptians, but it’s very nice to see that, you know, this culture is coming up and that everyone is now have this courage to apply for German companies and not to be scared, you know, because you will get there if you have the skillset. If you’re good enough, you will get there, you know, and before it wasn’t the case. So I started actually as a pharmacist, so I’m a pharmacist by the way. It’s a complete different work stream, but I’m a pharmacist and I worked as a pharmacist for quite some time. I was very good at it. So I was actually a researcher, a medical researcher. I was doing an anti-cancer drug that hopefully will be out in the market very soon. It’s herbal, it’s safe and it was very good. I was working with a patent doctor, a doctor that has patency. It was very cool.
And then afterwards I worked in pharmacovigilance, which also another part of the pharmacy growth road and everything. And then I had my second baby. And then I thought, okay, I want to stay from home. I want to see the kids grow and I want to be a good mother. Right. So I made the decision and I stayed at home and I wanted to find work that actually suits me. Right. And then I was checking some things and I thought, you know, okay, maybe I would go for Amazon, you know, Amazon, no one loses at Amazon. This is a fact, by the way, it’s very good. And I was like, okay, I’m going to open my shop in Amazon. So I had my digital company in, in Estonia. And then I had a team. I had a, like a great operations team, but this one was completely from from my friends. So all Egyptians. And I actually, I had a really good, successful shop. We were mainly doing the smart plugins. The lights and everything. And I started like this, you know, and then I started talking to the vendors in China and a lot of them also had shops, right? And they were like, would you like to run our shops? And I was like, okay, I can take the customer service part. And then I started working on the analysis part, which products will win, which products will lose. And then I started talking to them, but you know what? We can also do the keyword optimization, making sure that your product is always the first when, you know, the clients do the search and everything.
So I had a very big team at one point. I think I was handling like 30 shops beside my shop and we were rocking it. Right. But then the problem came is that I worked 24/7. I had 30 people under me or freelancers. And this is also a second problem. That’s why I love WorkMotion so much because being a freelancer again, doesn’t give you the employee rights. Right. So it was very crazy.
Tim:
I can imagine! And you’re right, it’s always appreciated to have employee rights.
Engy:
Haha yes! So, I had 30 people to run. I was working 24/7 because of course China has a time different zone. And it was very crazy. I was waking up very early before dawn and I wasn’t sleeping because I had to run everyone and I had to make sure that everyone is working. I had three different teams, customer service, keyword optimization, and the UX UI design, blah, blah, blah.
And then I had another team that is making sure that the analysis of our products are actually working, blah, blah, blah. So it was super hectic. And I said to myself, Engy, you have to stop. So I stopped. I stopped actually, leaving all the success behind. But I still have my shop, by the way, and I still love it. And we still actually win. So I really, I like, this is not propaganda for Amazon or anything, but it’s working. And if you need help, please feel free to ask me. I’ll give you advice.
Tim:
I wasn’t there.
Engy:
And then I worked as an, I got another opportunity at the same time for Flightright? Which is a company. It’s also German company. And this company is actually, so if you have a flight that is, you know, canceled or, you know, delayed, then what is your rights, you know, as a passenger and we started to educate people, what’s your, your, your rights according to the EU legislation, blah, blah, blah. And I actually worked as an Operation Manager there. It was very, very cool.
I’m very good with these stuff. I do claims all the time for my friends. But of course, the company was great. I mean, I loved it, but I was working also as a freelancer because there was no WorkMotion at the time. Right. And then when I was working there, actually, I was referred to WorkMotion by one of my colleagues. And then I came to WorkMotion as a Customer Experience Team Lead. And then I was ahead. And then I’m here. I’m a Director.
So in WorkMotion, I basically took care of all the customers. We practically founded the team. There was no team. We started in 2021. There was no big team. It was mainly operations. But then we came and said, but we know what we need to talk to the customers. We need to have a point of contact. We need to tell them, we need to educate them about our platform, about services. So we started actually building this and I started building this with a team of six.
You know, and then we grew and grew and grew and grew and, you know, we have 38 or 40 now. So you also need to, you know, like we’re growing so rapidly. And at the same time, it’s really interesting to see, you know, the growth of WorkMotion and how we also grow. And the best thing that I love is also that the management team have this trust and support that we promote from within, which I think is very, very important to be honest. I’m very grateful for that.
Tim:
That’s super impressive!
Engy:
Because I don’t know if a lot of people had this opportunity, but I’m very grateful that they gave me this opportunity because, you know, my experience is completely different, but I’m learning as I’m going and I don’t think no one will ever have this passion towards its own company like me. Yeah, because I love it, you know? Yeah.
Tim:
You certainly seem very passionate about it… That’s amazing!
Okay, coming back to Customer Experience, because one thing that obviously when I look at WorkMotion, I see a company that is per default global. Per default. So you are basically setting up entities in different countries, you’re helping your customers, but per default, probably your customer base is also global. So how do you…
Engy:
Yes. Yep.
Tim:
make sure to implement customer experience strategies that are deployable globally and not only locally because this is obviously when scaling something also from a cultural perspective, that is super, super hard for a lot of companies.
Engy:
Yes, so you’re right. We have a lot of clients everywhere. Of course, our main core of the clients are mainly in Germany and in EU generally. Because also I believe that all the European companies also appreciate having another European EOR, which is also one of our competitive things. Because especially in Germany, compliance is key.
Tim:
Mm -hmm.
Engy:
The first thing that we always say to our customers, look, we are very compliant to the core and we do everything to make sure that we’re compliant. So this is the first thing that we always tell our customers. And I feel that our customers also often feel relieved when they are with the European companies, other than, you know, other different countries in different regions where it can be lenient, you know, when it comes to regulations and labor laws. So the first thing is that, we have this compliance, so everyone can relax. We are a German compliant company. So this is the first thing. And the second thing is that we personalize our solutions. So we don’t just tell the client, here, this is what we’re offering. Boom. We actually talk to the client. And we try to solve the problem of the client. So what is the problem that we’re trying to solve? So is the problem, for example, the client shortage, then we have the work global solution. Do you want to hire anywhere? We got you.
Right? Do you want a solution that provides an employee-employer relationship so you still are the employer? Because some of our clients, you know, they’re a little bit afraid of the EOR model. So the EOR model, of course, maybe again to explain very briefly, imagine that you want to hire Engy from Egypt, you don’t need to have a legal entity. You don’t have to. You don’t need to know anything about the labor laws, you can just call WorkMotion and then WorkMotion has the legal entity. They hire me, but I do the tasks for you to. Okay.
The other way around, we have some clients who don’t really like this setup. They would like to be employer, employee relationship direct. They would like this direct relationship. They don’t want the third party, which is fine. And we got you because we have the work direct. And the work direct is very cool because we actually… set up a legal entity for you, we help you with the documentation, everything. And then we actually walk you through what you need to do. We give you advice whenever needed. We actually prepare the payroll reports for you so that you’re ready to pay. We make sure that you are covered from the legal aspect, right? And you don’t need to have HR who is specialized in the country or anything because we are already there for you, right? So the work direct, is also, is a great solution for those type of clients who wants this direct relationship.
Tim:
Wow.
Engy:
So we have the work global, we have the work direct. Also, it depends on the client’s, for example, requirements. We can also help. Like if the client, for example, tells us, you know what, I have a problem with identifying the right amount, we have the salary calculator, which tells you, OK, for this country, the salaries should be this amount. This is the glossary. You should take care. You know?
Tim:
Mm -hmm.
Engy:
Or for example, they tell us, where do I hire? We also give a lot of advice on where you can hire. You can also find this on our website, right? You can hire, for example, if it’s a software engineer, then we give you, for example, three of the top, for example, Egypt, India, and so on, right? So it’s very nice that we are trying to tailor our solutions to the clients, try to help them as much as possible to fix the issue that they’re having, you know? So I would say personalization is key.
And of course, the other thing when it comes to also personalization is we have, like I said, multinationals. So, for example, if you have a German company, we have a German speaker. If you have a Spanish, for example, talent that wants to ask about something, we have Spanish. So we actually can support in Spanish, in German, in Italian, Greek, you know, we, you know, a lot of different languages. We can also make sure to help.
Tim:
Amen. Being able to provide multilingual support is really life-changing for companies!
Engy:
Right! But for us, of course, English is the main one, but if we are requested to support any other language, we have it. Like we have Danish. We have, you just name it. The only thing that we don’t have at the moment, I believe is Mandarin, but maybe we will have, like, I don’t know. Maybe it will be in the future. Right. But, but we’re trying to support as much as possible. And of course we’re trying, like I said, we’re trying to really build relationships with the clients. We’re trying to give trainings to the teams.
Tim:
Yeah.
Okay.
Engy:
Because at the end of the day, our, I think our model is very difficult because we’re offering the service. Yes, we have a tech platform and everything, and it’s very savvy, but at the end of the day, it’s a service, right? So I think that the teams need to understand like what type of the, what is the client? What is the background of the client? Yes. Because for example, German clients, like, you know, German clients, they just want, like a direct simple answer instead of a really long one.
Tim:
Yeah, 100 %. Very low context client base, yeah.
Engy:
Yes, they just want to, you know, like, give me the answer, you know, instead of other clients, who would you want, you know, to get to talk about more and to, to love and protect. And so it’s really about knowing your client, knowing what they are facing and then how you can help them afterwards and personalize it.
Tim:
Yeah.
Tim:
But a question here, so also giving your data and analytics background. So what are the key metrics and KPI you are deploying internally to, I don’t know, track the success of your customer experience initiatives or also to steer your teams?
Engy:
Well, of course, of course, this is like super duper traditional, but of course, NPS and CSAT is the main important thing. I mean, NPS is super duper important because it gives you a general, non-biased feeling about the whole, you know, whole journey of the client or of the talent. Right. And then of course we have the CSAT, which is mainly based. So we have the CSAT actually for the onboarding phase because we have the onboarding phase of the talent, which is a very important touchpoint especially for WorkMotion, for example.
Tim:
This is probably where you have more of the churn as well, right? So it needs to be super fast, super seamless.
Engy:
Exactly. Yes. So we give the CSAT after the onboarding is done because each onboarding, like the best thing about WorkMotion, by the way, is the onboardings, right? So we really care to make sure that this is fast. It’s easy, easy for the talent, easy for the client. And then for the query CSAT. And by the way, we’re nailing the query CSAT. I’m very proud of the teams, to be honest. I mean, we have 90 % CSAT for clients and talents.
And of course, for SaaS companies, I mean, we are really, really doing very good with the benchmark. So I’m very proud of the CSAT. We have, of course, the DSAT. We sometimes also look at them differently to check, OK, how are we treating our talents and how are we treating our clients? Because we have two different bases. So it’s very important that we have both of them high. We also have the SLA adherence, which is very important. Like, what is the full resolution? Are we meeting our SLA? Because we have an SLA of 24 business hours, which is three business days. And we need to make sure that we’re hitting this. Of course, if the case took longer, our specialist always says that it will take longer. And please, most of the time it’s concerning legal stuff. So of course, it matters. We also check also the number of escalations.
So, I can tell you the escalation rate is even below 1%, which is really, really cool with the amount of cases that we’re having. And of course, we measured the volume and the resolution time. Like I said, resolution time or SLA, both are valid for us. So, SLA, because we also have internal SLAs between the teams, so it’s very important. And the resolution, which is what the client is seeing, right? Because it’s great if I have great SLA adherence, but then the… the outcome to the client is even more than, you know, like three, four days. Like if I’m a client, I won’t be happy. So, for me, the most important is the client facing part, to be honest. But of course, in order to get to this, you need to have good internal SLA adherence. So yeah, that’s pretty much the most important ones.
Tim:
I mean, especially in the client facing part, let’s talk about tech real quick. And I mean, how you are already playing around with AI or what you are seeing in the market also specifically forward motion, because obviously you have product that can be tech and AI infused. I don’t know, for example, legal assistance here, HR assistance here, but also you have basically the client facing customer experience part. So… I don’t know, how do you see this landscape? What are you already deploying? What are you testing?
Engy:
We are already testing right now. So we’re already testing a couple of ideas. And we already had an AI before, an AI tool for our knowledge base so that it’s easier for the operations team to use, right? Because I want it to be fast for the teams to find the information and then sending out to the clients so that it decrease the SLA. So we already have something in place, but I’m not like, 100 % loving it at the moment. So right now we’re checking a couple of other tools actually. And those tools, what we are doing right now is two things:
So the first one is that this is for the internal teams for faster check on the knowledge and everything. Because for us, the most important, let’s say, thing that we’re trying to tackle, because we’re operating in 160 countries.
So yes, we have specialists, of course, and we have experts for the top tier countries. For example, like we have 15 countries that we consider top tier, right? So we have experts in those. But then the other countries, 160, it’s so much, you have no idea. So it’s crazy, right? We have, we need like, we’re still like generalists. I’m not gonna lie. It’s very, very tough. And at the same time, you need to have this, first of all, you need to have this AI that is connected or something that tells you, for example, if a labor law is changing or something, but this is very difficult.
We tried to search for this, but it doesn’t exist. So our knowledge team actually does this manually. And then what we’re trying to do is for AI to actually capture those knowledge and then put it as easy as possible with the elastic search or with the AI, right? And we’re also now checking if AI can also check the previous questions that we received and then give the answers or make the suggestions for the teams.
So instead of they are actually checking, if we have this question before and we have already answered, then the AI would actually give the answer right away. And then if this answer doesn’t, you know, it’s not good for the client or for the talent, or if they have something extra, they can just check, you know, or like put it, like select that they want to go for the ticketing system. And then the support team would support because the problem is, the scope is so big, you know, and it’s not ABC. It’s like when you answer like a question, you get a whole different set of questions depending on the question. So it’s very tricky, but AI, of course, can play a great role.
And we’re also using AI for analytics a little bit because you would need a lot of time to check, OK, the country demand, for example, and then they can like the analytics can tell you where to go or where to focus at the moment. So yeah, I mean, AI is great, but at the end of the day, I can tell you, at least for us, first of all, I appreciate more the personalized experience. So I don’t want to, you know, like we can have a chatbot, by the way, it’s easy. It’s easy to have a chatbot, but I can tell you something. I’m not a big fan of using chatbots if it’s not really functional, you know, like if I’m a client and I use a chat bot and it just, I sometimes it gets, come on, give me the right answer. Like tell me so I will not like, and this is what something that I said to even our founders and our management ones, like I’m not going to use it unless we have, first of all, a great knowledge base that the bot can take directly from it and send to the clients. And second of all, I would instead actually love the personalized touch. And even when we made a lot of interviews with the clients, they said, no, please don’t put a chatbot. We actually love the human touch more. So the AI is mainly used internally, but… all the customer facing experience, at least up till now, it’s all personalized because also the clients feel special and that we’re actually understanding. They’re not just talking to a bot, because the bot is usually, here’s an article, here’s an article. Do you find this helpful? No. I need someone to talk to. I need someone to raise my problems with. So yeah, but I like the AI. Yes.
Tim:
Yeah.
Yeah, especially in your use case, right? I mean, we are seeing this, I mean, we have over 2000 clients globally and we are seeing that level one, so anything transactional will be optimized, right? End of story. But in a B2B segment, as you are in, especially with a highly diverse target group around the globe, training and feeding the model requires a lot of data input.
Engy:
Yes. Yes. Very tricky.
Tim:
And still in the end, you need to be sure, especially with the generative part. I mean, hallucination in your kind of industry would be probably the worst that can happen. So yeah. OK.
And so since we want to keep this Coffee Chat short, and we are already over time, Florence will not be happy, so so much good stuff to edit.
So I think last question, like on a personal note, I mean, you obviously… Your track record is super cool. I mean, not only in work motion, where you started at the Customer Experience Team Lead, I don’t know, a year later Operations Team Lead six months later, Head of CX, now Director of Operations. So what were the major challenges and what is your advice for anyone joining the CX space? I mean, you started, obviously you just started at one point. So what is your advice?
Engy:
Okay, so I would say the first thing is listen. Like you need to listen. You really need to listen to your clients. You need to listen to your talents. You need to listen to your team. So I always listen. I think it’s the most important key for me at least is…
I’m listening and I’m not listening to respond. I’m listening to understand, to know the problem so that we can fix it. Right. So listening is the most important thing for me. And then the second thing is actually learning. Like I always tell my team that you’re never too old to learn and it’s fine. I may, I may not know everything, but at least I will try to help as much as possible. And then we can learn together. Right. There is no shame in that.
And the third one, especially if you’re in the leadership role, because I really love leadership so much, I’m very passionate also about this, I’m very passionate about my team, is that empower your team. I don’t like when people hide the information or anything. Everything that I learn, I always teach the team. I always do, even up till this moment. Even if it’s small, I tell them, look, by the way, I made this, it was a mistake, for example, let’s all learn from it, or the other way around. So…
We don’t really judge each other. I don’t have a problem with a mistake. I always tell them that, please tell me. And they’re always like, Angie, I fucked up. I made a mistake and blah, blah, blah. And it’s fine. You know, it’s fine to make mistakes. We’re learning, right? Especially with the new scope, like, you know, the EOR model, it’s very new, right? It’s very new to everyone. And we even tell that to our customers sometimes. Like, it’s okay. We made a mistake, for example, if we made a mistake or… it’s okay, we’re learning together. We didn’t know about, for example, blah, blah. And now we are knowledgeable enough or this is the options, please choose with us. So always make them also part of the problem, right? And then embrace innovation. So I’m a very crazy person. I have a lot of ideas most of the time and I’m making my team crazy. And if they hear this, they will laugh now because I have a lot of ideas and we just prioritize them together. We brainstorm together. We prioritize and then we work through them. And I’m a very big fan of try before you buy. So I always make a pilot first and then if it, if it was successful, I go in the next level. So this is also something that I think it’s important. Don’t make a lot of changes at once. Be careful, make the changes very slowly, right?
And building relationships. I mean, I love my team to the core. I love each and every one of them. They know that we are sometimes we’re very personal. Sometimes we’re very professional. So it’s okay, like love your team. Okay. And don’t be scared. Even if they are better than you in some stuff, don’t be scared. Don’t be threatened. Having actually experienced team on your team is actually beneficial for you, you know, and stay positive. So you have no idea. This is my main advice. Stay, stay positive and have fun. Enjoy the ride, you know, and of course celebrate success. And, you know, even if it’s a small win, just, you know what, give credits. Acknowledge the win, say thank you to your team. I think it’s the thing that I really love the most.
And final thing, make your customer the North Star. That’s the most important.
Tim:
That’s really good. I think.
I think there was a lot in there. I mean, listen not to respond, but to understand and always like the small wins, something in business as usual that we tend to oversee. Angie, thank you so much. I mean, this is, I love that talking to such a passionate individual like you, it like made my day. So I’ve probably got a smile for quite some time. This was a great coffee chat. Thank you so much for joining and to everyone listening in. See you in the next episode. Bye bye.
Engy:
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you. I loved it. Thank you, Tim. Bye -bye.
