Oriflame Summer Internship

This week, 1st - 7th of August, was the final week before my project presentation, and I was even working during the weekend to get it ready. I had 10 project questions that I should answer, which all had to do with different working areas in Oriflame. I probably mentioned some of the questions before, but they were:

 

1. What is our e-profile?

2. How is our customer service online/offline?

3. How are we perceived by our consultants?

4. What training is needed for our customer service?

5. Do we need a CRM? 6. Is Aramex (a delivery company) losing business for us?

7. SWOT-analysis of the customer service

8. SWOT-analysis of Aramex

9. Which are the real problems that Oriflame Tunisia faces?

10. Recommendations and action plan

As you can see above, the questions are quite broad and can be solved in differrent ways. Today, I got many questions about my project, and I thought it would be good to describe it a bit more here at the blog, for people interested in applying for the Global Summer Internship - which I can strongly recommend.

 

When all of us interns (we were 5) presented in Stockholm, I was quite shocked, because everyone else only got one, two or maximum four questions to work with during the summer - there were both similar questions to mine and quite different, depending on what needed to be done and analyzed in the country and at the Oriflame office. With this said, all of us might have quite different experiences when it comes to working with our projects, and we also probably solved them in quite different ways.

 

Me, for example, was doing a lot of research, both online and offline, before I started. Some days I was with the sales team, some days in the warehouse, some days annoying the finance team and marketing team with my questions, and of course Jonas was always there for me if I needed any help or advices. I conducted a questionnairy online and offline, did an on-site visit to Aramex to understand more about their business and talk to the people in charge and a lot of other things. It was a lot of own responsibility, and by the end of the day - I was the only one responsible for what I had learned and accomplished when I finished work. For some people, this can be quite relaxing, not having a fixed schedule everyday. For other people challenging, not to get very clear guidelines and a lot of responsibility.

 

I'm very adaptable as a person, so for me it was fine. In the beginning, I remember that I could feel a bit shy and not 100 % sure of what I should look for always, but overall there was no problem at all. In the areas where I felt more insecure, I just did more research, and I also used my colleagues to discuss ideas - since they after all had been working at Oriflame much longer than me.

 

 

My presentation went very well, and it opened up for discussion, which was very positive. I presented for Jonas and all the managers. It was a bit nervous, since I was going to give feedback on all of their work and all of them are much more experiened in their field than me, not even comparable. But all of them are very nice, and they listened very carefully and were very interested in my findings and what I had to say. For almost each question, I also had an action plan and recommendation for the next steps, and it was great to see that this later led to something and that many of my recommendations actually were implemented later. By this said, I would claim that depending on how good the results of your project are ;-), you have to possibility to make a great impact and you feel quite proud when you see your recommendations implemented.

 

A bit funny thing, is that I was working with my presentation until after midnght at the office the night before - and managed to get locked in! Apparently, there was supposed to be a security guard, but after have been shouting a bit and still wasn't able to find him downstairs by the entrance, I decided to sleep on the floor (...) 3 AM, since I was also afraid to set off an alarm or something similar. I woke up 40 minutes later, by the security man, who then told me to sleep on his "bed" made up by two small couches, since it was "too dangerous" for me to go out 4 AM. I took a taxi back home at 7 PM, got some sleep in my bed, and had my presentation at 2 PM as planned.

 

 

 

 

 

What can I say? With my latest blog post published the 27th of July 2016, and today being Thursday 9th of February 2017... Well, at least I can say - and I hope that you agree - that better late than never! I surely have been wanting to make an update and fair conclusion of how the best summer of my life ended, and after seeing dear people from Oriflame today at the Stockholm School of Economics' student fair Handelsdagarna (today, it was exactly one year ago since I met with Oriflame at Handelsdagarna and first heard about the Global Summer Internship) I felt so inspired and happy, so I couldn't just keep me from finally updating.

First of all, I want to say that I definitely have had my fair share of adventures in my life. The latest summer I spent in Sweden was in 2010 and since then, I was spending my summer in Ukraine in 2011, Moscow in 2012, backpacking in Southeast in 2013, in Vietnam/China/Thailand in 2014 and in Vietnam in 2015. I've had such an amazing life and seen so much, and with this said, I still must say that the best summer in my life i spent in Tunisia in 2016 - thank you Oriflame! 

 

But, if we rewind the tape a bit, please let me just sum up what happened from the 27th of July to the 15th of August, when my internship ended:

 

The before project presentation stress (I was going to present the result of my project the 9th of August, to later have time for implementation and execution) set in, and the upcoming 13 days after my latest post, I was quite busy with summing up and analyzing all the data that I've got in, e.g. from the customer service survey, go through the couple of thousands of customer service e-mail that had gotten in for July - and other "small" things, which's time I had perhaps underestimated a bit.