Experience and enthusiasm are key to self-development

As a trainer, Marjon Koch helps customer service employees to develop themselves. She is helped in this endeavour by her years of experience and infectious enthusiasm. She recently celebrated her 13th year at Van den Bosch, but after all that time she hasn’t stopped learning: "There’s still so much growing I want to do."

In her role, Koch is responsible for the onboarding and training of customer service staff. An important task, as she says: "Customer focus is a major aspect for us. Our customer service staff are tuned in and they think along with the customer. They oversee every aspect of the transport process. That requires a lot of industry and customer knowledge, as well as systems expertise."

From tour guide to trainer
And who better to transfer that knowledge than someone who personally held the position for years. Koch started with us as a planner, then moved to Customer Service and progressed to supervisor. Her input and expertise were sought when Van den Bosch started building its own transport management system, which resulted in COM.

Because of her knowledge of COM, she was asked to train colleagues. This suited her so well that she made the switch to full-time trainer last year. "You need a lot of substantive knowledge to work with the systems. As an in-house trainer, I know exactly what people encounter on the job."

She had never previously thought of becoming a trainer. After studying tourism, Koch actually wanted to become a bus tour guide. However, she is completely a home in her current role. "I get so much energy from training people. It’s a great job to have." 

Ambition creates challenge
Together with her colleagues from the Learning & Development team Koch has now set up a detailed training programme for customer service employees. That has laid the basis for operating in the team. "We eventually want to move towards an onboarding process where training and one-to-one coaching go hand in hand, because everyone is different. That’s why we’ve started a pilot with a buddy system."

Van den Bosch continues to grow, which means there will not only be new employees, but also branches in other countries. Those new colleagues also need to be trained in our systems and ways of working. And so, Koch flew to Dubai earlier this year to train her colleagues at Van den Bosch DMCC as a 'COM guru'. "They themselves came up with ideas to make COM more suitable for their deep-sea operations. That was great to see."

The equally ambitious Koch herself is certainly not yet done with learning either. “I want to grow more in giving training courses, for example. You have to be constantly up to date. This role still gives me more than enough opportunity to learn and challenge myself.”