2018 Corporate Immigration & Relocation Awards

8 Acquisition International - 2018 Corporate Immigration & Relocation Awards To meet its clients’ needs in this rapidly developing space, Boxx has to work hard to provide an innovative solution. Each client is different, and as such the team at Boxx offers a bespoke solution to ensure that they receive the support they need, as Rens highlights. “When we first start working with a new client, we follow a set process which ensures that throughout the engagement they receive the exceptional level of service that they expect, combined with a unique solution that meets their needs. First of all, the most important thing is that we actually listen to the needs and expectations of our clients. Secondly, when providing our services, we deliver what we agreed with the client.” “Obviously, we have a default way of working and cooperation with our clients, but we always seek to tailor this around their individual needs. We meet these by being flexible in the way we deliver our services and knowing and understanding these are more important than just do the job that is to be delivered. Meeting (or even exceeding) expectations of expats when we deliver our services, will lead to happier expats. On the other side we need to and can only be flexible within the restrictions given by our clients. Not all of our clients expect the best service or caring and as such it is our job to have the best understanding of what they expect, enabling us to live up to that.” This collaborative approach extends to the firm’s staff, and as such Rens is keen to highlight how the company implements a supportive internal culture where everyone feels included. “Employees from different backgrounds work at Boxx, which provides us with a dynamic work environment. We have former in-house specialists from the HR departments of multinational companies, we have employees with a long-time consultancy background with mainly Big4 firms and of course employees that we train ourselves. This mix of different backgrounds means that we are not only able to understand our clients and deliver accordingly, but also gives the opportunity for our staff to learn a lot from each other. Further, for each client we have an appointed account team headed by an account manager. Also in these account teams there will be a mix of the various backgrounds and in these teams, there is a very high sense of delivering our services to the client together and in that way putting the client (the employer and its expats) always first. Finally, as most of the employees are located in one location it is easy to share things with each other and directly respond , which makes our service delivery model quick and flexible. As a result, all account teams act as one and all employees have a sense of making it happen by working together, it is a true joint effort and everyone contributes to this.” With regards to the future, Rens is confident that the market’s move towards a greater focus on expats will provide his firm with a myriad of exciting opportunities for further growth, as he proudly concludes. “Ultimately, at Boxx we feel that, moving forward, there will be employers that will be more and more “...we follow a set process which ensures that throughout the engagement they receive the exceptional level of service that they expect, combined with a unique solution that meets their needs. First of all, the most important thing is that we actually listen to the needs and expectations of our clients. Secondly, when providing our services, we deliver what we agreed with the client.” focussing on the well-being of their expats. This means that they will need to understand what their expat needs and expects when going on assignment. Our research programs focus on these well-being topics, for instance also in relation to talent management, how to attract and retain talent. Further, we are currently working on a new tool to increase expat well-being, the so-called “expat customer journey”, where we approach the expat assignment from a customer journey perspective.” “Since it is our belief that expats, their spouses and children, are customers like all other consumers, the steps they have to take in an assignment process are essentially not very different from any other customer journey. Of course, an assignment is complex and exists of a number of different journeys. Still the collection of these journeys, can be regarded as one big customer experience. In essence it is much like a retail customer journey for instance. Every customer has different motivations, needs, expectations, sentiments, and prior experiences. A retail company knows that studying on the way all these different customers experience their journeys, can give them insights into the expectations of the customers and thus ultimately on their satisfaction scores. Upfront knowledge about expectations of expats and spouses (regarding the role of the employer, the role of the external advisor or regarding their own role), is key in order to gain maximum satisfaction, not only for the expats themselves but also for their employers looking at return on investment.”