Never without… my AirPods!

No, Key Account Manager Céline Audoore does not wear striking white earrings. It’s just her AirPods that she sometimes forgets to take off. Read here why Céline is so attached to her earphones.

“As soon as I get to work, I put on my AirPods. I then look for a playlist on Spotify with focus music. It’s not exactly music I listen to for pleasure — they’re fairly monotonous melodies — but it helps to focus. When I get a phone call on my smartphone, the AirPods automatically switch to the call. At work I do take them off when I go to lunch so that I can have a chat with the colleagues. But when I take a break at home, I often keep them. But then I switch to the radio so that my brain knows that it can relax for a while.’

‘As a Key Account Manager (KAM), I spend many hours on the phone every day, with colleagues and with customers. In my case, these are industrial customers who are directly connected to the Elia grid, such as Katoen Natie or Borealis. Our main task is to understand what they need and to support them as well as possible.

In the past, we mainly responded to questions we received from them. Often they had already worked out an entire project themselves and only thought about involving Elia at the last minute. This sometimes resulted in unpleasant surprises.

Now we work more proactively. We think along from the start and propose transparent and realistic solutions. That approach pays off. We notice that customers increasingly see us as a partner and that they like to seek our advice on projects that are sometimes still in their infancy. This is also better for Elia, because it allows us to better assess the future needs of our largest consumers.

We are now receiving a lot of questions from companies that want to electrify their processes, which will greatly increase their electricity consumption. We get questions like: what should we do? Do we need an extra cable? How much will that cost? By when is that possible? Companies also want (and need to) use more and more green energy, so they contact us to connect solar panels on their roofs, or to install wind turbines on their site.’

‘For customers, we are the SPOC within Elia. But of course we don’t know everything. That is why we call on our fellow experts to study a question and formulate an answer. We then check whether the input of our colleagues is sufficiently understandable and not too technical, and whether the customer’s question is answered.

So a KAM is constantly in contact with different parties. And for my calls, my AirPods are a real plus. No need to put on and take off my headphones all the time, no pressure on my ears and head, just two little earphones in my ears that I don’t even notice anymore. And that I sometimes forget to take off!’