Our Team

Liz Machtynger

Mobile: +44 (0)7957-362354 liz.machtynger@customeressential.com

Liz Machtynger started up Customer Essential in 2002 after realising that there was an urgent need for a new kind of customer management consultancy – one which could provide the knowledge and guidance that an organisation needed as well as  the tools to enable people to help themselves rather than drafting in large numbers of outsiders to do it for them. For her good customer management is ultimately about making a business more sustainable.

"It is about getting a balance between making money for the company and doing the right thing by the customer. Once you have got that spark in an organisation, it makes a phenomenal difference both to the bottom line and to the people who work there".

And the full interview...

Liz Machtynger started up Customer Essential in 2002 after realising that there was a urgent need for a new approach to customer management consultancy. Having worked on the client side for big companies like BP and been a consultant at IBM, she had experienced both sides of the consulting structure and decided there had to be a better way.   She says: "I realised that people needed coaching and advising and knowledge brought into an organisation - but the paradox was that consulting was actually tipping the balance of the culture within that organisation. When you have a large group of consultants coming in, they bring with them their own culture and their own way of doing things, and when they leave that leaves a gulf".

She decided that the solution was a consultancy which could provide the knowledge and guidance that people within an organisation needed – but by providing people with the tools they needed  to help them help themselves rather than drafting in large numbers of outsiders to do it for them.
For Liz it was also important that Customer Essential was as much focused on the individual within an organisation as on the organisation itself. She says: "The people we work with and mentor are as important as the organisation we are working with".

As a result Liz has deliberately brought together a team of people who have very different disciplines and skills to offer so that together the Customer Essential team are able to provide a holistic solution to any problem. She explains: "An organisation may want to bring us in just to solve a data problem but we make sure we have our holistic hat on when we solve the problem so they won't hit a problem in the next phase".   She first became interested in customer management herself when she was asked to manage the logistics for a group of customers from a centralised office for BP in Austria. Carrying out such a task in a foreign country, working in a foreign language, meant that she quickly needed to find the right mechanisms to build a knowledge base about the customers. Liz moved on to improve early customer contact centres for BP and from that point on she was hooked on the idea of customer management.

She says: "The overriding thing that excites me about customer management is you can't really pin it down. I love to chase it around and make it work for people. Every customer is different and every organisation is different, and every market place is different so every time you are dealing with a different situation. There is no single solution, and there never could be. Which is great".

She says that one of the fundamental issues many organisations need to overcome is the fact that as people are promoted within a company, they tend to move away from having direct contact with customers. "Many organisations see their front line, the people who are dealing with the customers, as being people who are lower skilled. Therefore if someone is promoted, they are promoted up and away from the customer and so they lose the disciplines they need to have and the organisation loses the continuity of what it was trying to achieve".

Liz says that while many people see the principal aim of customer management as being to improve the profits of an organisation, for her it is also about making the business itself more sustainable – and therefore a more enjoyable place for people to work.
She says: "It is very easy to set up a company for a couple of years, make a fast buck and then run away and not even care about the customers you sold to. But if you want to develop a sustainable brand over a longer period of time and you want to create new things for your customer base to keep them involved and excited and respecting the things that they are buying from you, then you have to get closer to them and understand what works and what doesn't work. It is about getting a balance between making money for the company and doing the right thing by the customer. Once you have got that spark in an organisation, it really does make a phenomenal difference both to the bottom line and to the people who work there."

FACTFILE

Qualifications: BA (Hons) in languages from Essex university. Management MBA from City University, London. Fellow and professor of customer management at University of Piacenza, Italy. Liz is also a fellow of Institute of Direct Marketing.

Particular skills: large amounts of patience and the ability to listen to people at all levels of an organisation.   

Liz is a Freelance Consultant