Monneo: Going Completely Online As ‘The New Normal’

When COVID-19 disrupted the business world, Monneo already had all of its processes online, which gave them a jump-start on working remotely and helping its clients overcome their own challenges. However, Managing Director Lilia Metodieva shares how her team overcame the challenges of not being able to network at trade shows, conferences and other offline venues.

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Monneo‘s Managing Director Lilia Metodieva.

At Monneo, automation and flawless client experience have always been top priorities. The pandemic happened at a time when all of our processes were already online (client applications, onboarding, monitoring, etc.), so, it didn’t really affect our day-to-day routines or our clients. Offering a fully automated and online solution was something we planned for from inception.

Our team got used to the remote working environment very quickly, and this gave us additional comfort and confidence that we were able to deal with any difficulty that was coming. We strongly believe people are the company’s greatest asset, so if we had our teams’ remote support and dedication, we knew we would eventually be okay, and that our clients wouldn’t have any issues.

The challenge we were facing, though, was the inability to meet our potential clients and partners face-to-face at conferences and trade shows. We had a strategy for big expansion in 2020, and a great part of that was based on offline networking. We had to do a major shift in our client acquisition activities, almost completely replacing offline activities with online versions.

We were in a situation where we had the solution, and it was a very good one. We knew our target customers would have benefited enormously from this solution, but we weren’t able to meet them through traditional offline networking. And in our digital world, we believed traditional face-to-face contact was the best way to present our services to a potential client and gain their trust.

But we were facing a completely new reality, where the usual offline means of client acquisition — like trade shows, conferences and events — could no longer work. We could no longer simply invite clients into the office, or jump on a plane to meet someone, or do a premium sponsorship and a booth for an industry event. Our strategy had to change to address this new reality.

Fortunately, shortly after the initial few weeks of complete shock and lockdown, we saw in the payments industry that there were many new opportunities to help us reach out to target customers. Whether it was through a virtual roundtable, an online video conference, a webinar or a mix of all of them, we were able to send our message to our customers. We had to adapt to this new reality, but everyone in our payments sphere seemed to adapt to it as well – therefore, shifting our client acquisition strategy from offline to online networking proved to be working very well.