Descartes’ Employee Excellence & Innovation Award Presented to Andreas Habenicht

Recognized for taking initiative to improve tools and processes providing internal visibility into customer support communications

Every quarter, Descartes’ Employee Excellence and Innovation award is presented to a deserving Descartes employee. Based on peer nominations, the award recognizes Descartes employees for their contributions in helping to make Descartes’ customers, partners, and fellow employees successful. Eligible Descartes employees must have demonstrated ‘Excellence’ by performing their job with integrity and to the highest professional standards, exceeding expectations while achieving exceptional results for external and/or internal stakeholders and ‘Innovation’ by sharing valuable ideas to develop new or better processes, tools, methods, systems, products or services in support of Descartes’ mission.

I’m pleased to announce Descartes’ Excellence and Innovation award winner for the first quarter of fiscal year 2019 is Andreas Habenicht, Team Lead – Support, from our office in Leipzig, Germany. Andreas joined us as part of the Descartes pixi* acquisition and has worked tirelessly to implement and improve a tool that provides visibility into Descartes’ global customer support portal while increasing communication and collaboration for internal teams that support our customers.

Manuel Freitag, Head of Services, Professional Services – EMEA at Descartes, nominated Andreas for his dedication to Descartes customers and his colleagues, saying, "Andreas strives to communicate openly, encouraging collaboration to further improve the customer support tools used by his colleagues. He took the initiative to create an internal tool that allows increased visibility into customer support information. This has allowed other customer-facing departments access to support information to view open customer inquiries with summaries and status updates, providing visibility of tickets assigned to other teams. This tool has increased transparency of customer correspondence for all internal team requirements and allows visibility into customer communication between departments, which increases effectiveness and customer satisfaction while reducing costs, by eliminating the need for additional support portal licenses."

Tobias Packheiser, Expertise Centre Manager, Customer Support at Descartes, nominated Andreas for going the extra mile for Descartes customers and his colleagues, saying, "Andreas recognized the high demand for access to customer communications regarding support tickets, so he educated himself on the functionality of the customer support portal's API, evaluated all necessary changes, and then collaborated and networked with Descartes colleagues for implementation and testing to ensure a stable global roll-out. The tool implemented gives other departments a better overview, increases customer loyalty and at the same time relieves support of internal requests for visibility into customer interactions, ultimately resulting in increased service to our customers and end-users."

We asked Andreas how it felt to be nominated and selected for the Descartes Employee Excellence and Innovation Award and for his thoughts on being a member of Descartes’ O.N.E. L.E.A.R.Ning T.E.A.M.; here’s his response:

This is amazing! I'm very happy and proud to see that a small tool for my department was able to help the whole company. Not only have I gained a lot of experience with this project, I have also met marvelous colleagues who supported me with their knowledge to make this happen. I'm thankful that I was given this opportunity along with the whole support of my team.

On behalf of the Descartes’ O.N.E. L.E.A.R.Ning T.E.A.M, I extend our congratulations to Andreas Habenicht on his award win and thank him for his continued support of Descartes.