From Account Manager to Marketing Manager, to Customer Experience Manager, to Group Customer Experience Director.
At Dstny, we love to see people grow. To create an environment where our colleagues can continue to evolve and learn. One perfect example of this is Hylke, who has gone from Account Manager to Marketing and Customer Experience Manager and is now our Group Customer Experience Director, over her 7 years within the company.
“At Dstny, there are many opportunities to grow and continue to evolve your career. I love building things from scratch, and this company has given me several opportunities to do so, throughout the years. “
Name: Hylke Huys
Nickname: Huys (it phonetically it means house in Dutch)
Age: 29 (turning 30 in a few months)
From: Puurs, Belgium
Department: Customers Experience
Role: Group Costumer Experience Director
Years at Dstny: 7
TV or Cinema? Cinema
iPhone or Samsung? Samsung (sorry Tim Schmit)
Sweet or savoury? Sweet
Morning or evening? Both (With a baby I have become a morning person but I Iike going out and stuff in the evenings as well.)
7 years ago, I graduated from a five-year marketing and management education. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do and what type of company I wanted to work with. But my father has been working within telco all his life and he had (what was then called) Destiny as a partner. He told me about this start-up company that was run by two cool and very driven brothers, so I applied.
My first role at the company was as an Account Manager, which I worked as for 2,5 years. During this time, the company had grown from 25 to 70 employees and had a much larger customer base. But we didn’t do a lot of structured marketing, something we realized we needed. Marketing was what I had studied, and now I got the opportunity to kick off our brand new marketing department:
Starting the whole thing from scratch, figuring out who we needed and what we needed to complete the tasks at hand.
The company continued to grow in a rapid pace and a lot of acquisitions were made. But in 2020, we realized that we had somewhat lost touch with our customers, along the way. Something we really did not want. And that’s where my next opportunity came up.
We started working on Customer ExperienceDepartment next to my Marketing Manager roleOne thing we noticed was that the support environment was a pain-point for our customers. So in collaboration with our support manager, we started to focus on improving and optimizing this. Simultaneously, we gradually shifted Service Management and escalation management towards CX.
In the beginning we worked on improving what we saw needed to be done. We did what was in front of us. But I wanted to do it all in a more structured way. So I did a post-graduate (master class) in Customer Experience, to make sure we got the most out of our strategy. We started using internal feedback loops and setting up a customer success team so that everyone had transparency on what areas we were focusing on at the moment.
In November 2021, when I got back from my maternity leave, our CEO Daan De Wever asked me what I wanted to do within the company. He asked me if I wanted to lead our Customer Experience work on a group level, making sure we keep the same level of CX, through-out the company.
This meant I had to let go of my old marketing and CX department, stop working on a national level and create an international strategy. I love building things from scratch, from the ground up, coming up with new ideas and then making them become reality. Certainly if it helps not only customers, but also our internal efficiency and effectivity. So of course, I said yes to getting this new role.
The biggest challenge so far has been to get all country and entity organizations on the same path. Seeing when an organization is ready to take the next steps in their CX journey. Also, I’m not an expert on every local market, I’m not supposed to be, so we need local CX managers to actually deploy the program and make sure things happen as planned. My job is to help them and make sure we do all this in a structured and aligned way, on vision, strategy, dashboarding and cultural engagement.
I’m still in a starting phase of working with our CX program, and I’m really excited to see where we will be in three years or so.
And also, I’m curious to see where we are going with our products. Everything is evolving and improving in a rapid pace at the moment. The company is growing so fast and it is going to be very interesting to see how all the pieces are going to fit together and what our position will be in Europe and around the world.
Dstny is a growing company where things are evolving fast and I love how this provides a great opportunity to learn. I’ve always had an ambition to work with different cultures, and now I get to do that. To co-create this amazing programme with people from our different organizations, around Europe.
I also love the informal way of working together. Like I have said, Dstny has grown rapidly but we always kept both feet on the ground. We have to evolve on a professional level and mature in many aspects, but I love that – while doing that – there is no rigid hierarchy, instead we have a family vibe that I really appreciate. Not only in Belgium, but in all entities.
As a final note, Jonas Klang, the Group People Experience Director, gave us his thoughts on Dstny and personal development.
“At Dstny, we always strive for personal development and encourage our employees to be curious and challenge their way of doing things. With our broad range of services, Dstny Group can attract employees in different units and roles and also offer international internal movement and career.
We always empower everyone around us to be the best versions of themselves to drive performance and create engagement & wellbeing” said Jonas.
