This is the fourteenth article in a series about members of the Minerva team and how they think about Minerva’s core values and contribute to the customer promise: "ensuring carefree traceability". 

Jasper talks to Siebe Borger, about his role as Commercial Director, his vision about the calibration market, Minerva’s promise and core values.

Making a customer happy

What is it that you do in your role as Commercial Director at Minerva?

I am involved in sales and marketing. In my sales role I deal with daily orders from Minerva customers. When it comes to marketing, we develop new services and make them known to the world. In addition, I strategically think about the improvement of our services so that we can better satisfy Minerva customers.

What do you like the most about your role?

The best part of my role I feel is that I get to make the customer happy and to build relationships.

I also like to explore what trends are happening in the market and turn those changes into a new standardised product or service. I love a certain degree of innovation that leads to better results.  

I stand for what we say and what we promise

What does Minerva’s promise “ensuring carefree traceability” for our customers mean to you? 

I think it’s a very important promise. It means that customers can send their equipment in for calibration and that we take care of the equipment completely, at a realistic price and realistic lead times. In terms of turnaround time, we stick to between five and ten working days as standard TAT. Turnaround times are under pressure as customers want their equipment back faster and faster these days. Calibrating high-quality standards and calibrators still have some magical feel to it for many but we see that a lot of equipment is actually used by our customers as an asset in production lines.

Calibration services are also increasingly becoming a commodity. Purchasing behaviour of customers is becoming more rational and puts more emphasis on demanding a high level of service. We have to keep up with the changing markets. I see it as my task to increase awareness within Minerva in regard to what customers expect from calibration service.

What is your contribution to Minerva's promise of “ensuring carefee traceabilty”?

I think it is very important to monitor within the sales team that we make strong agreements with the customer. We put a lot of attention into the preliminary phase. It is essential to get the customer's expectations 100% clear before we make a quotation. When we make the quotation, we always check internally how we are going to carry out the service.

If customers are not sure what they want, we keep asking questions. Sometimes that clarity does not come, or it appears that we cannot answer the question properly. If it turns out that we cannot serve the customer properly, we will not make a quotation. We do this to protect Minerva, but especially to protect the customer from disappointment. We want to be able to fulfill our promise to the customer.

What is your personal promise to Minerva’s customers?

Customers can hold me accountable for my commitment and those of our team. I stand for what we say and what we promise.

Our values determine which new employees we hire

The core values of Minerva are integrity, innovative, skilled, involved and service oriented.

With each core value, could you give us an explanation or an example?

Our core values are very important to Minerva. Our values are also included in job applications and job descriptions; they determine what type of new employees we hire.

Minerva is a company with integrity. For me, integrity is about using high-quality equipment that we sell and that we calibrate for our customers. Minerva stands for solid and reliable. Just like the equipment we sell. We also see this reflected in our people. It requires our people to communicate very clearly. We are also honest in order to get the service to the level that customers expect. Being concrete and getting down to the core is essential with regards to maintaining our integrity.

Personally, I highly value innovation. I am a critical person and I always see room for improvement. Looking at the innovative parts of Minerva, I believe that we have taken good steps so far. For example, that we implemented the entry inspection and made several changes to the customer processes. I also find our new High-Pressure Controller (MNR800-HPC400) innovative. It is a unique and distinctive product in the high-end calibration market.

We want our employees to be proud of Minerva

I think the Minerva team is highly skilled. We have the right people with the right capacity and skills to do their job properly. We hire good people but, in my opinion, quality must be proven in practice. Good and clear communication is very important in the calibration market, internally, but especially to the customer. We also keep each other on our toes. Our people take a look at each other's work and offer constructive criticism when possible.

Without personal involvement we cannot do our job properly. We want our employees to be proud of Minerva and the work they do.

Being service oriented is an important value of Minerva. If all goes well, all the aforementioned core values have been fulfilled.

It's all about making our customers happy, he or she should feel good about Minerva!