In the Digital Excellence Monitor 2017, energy provider Greenchoice ranked number 1 in the energy sector on both desktop and mobile. In this interview, we speak with marketing manager Marieke van den Hoek of Greenchoice about customer satisfaction as a board-level KPI, greenwashing, saying what you do and doing what you say, agile scrum, and digital self-service.
Congratulations on winning in the energy sector in the Digital Excellence Monitor 2017, Marieke van den Hoek. How do you and your team maintain control over the quality of your customer experience? What do you consider the ingredients for digital success?
"We're naturally thrilled with the win. You can see that brand really made the difference in the report, and we see that reflected elsewhere too. We're very protective of our brand and the fact that many customers are willing to recommend us. You see this in customer satisfaction research, whether conducted by ourselves or by other parties like WUA.
"Customer satisfaction is a top-level business objective for us. That's why we measure the entire customer journey. We do this in various ways: we have several touchpoints in the customer journey that we measure monthly or periodically, and then we measure customer satisfaction, customer effort score, NPS and NLS.
"There are eight moments we've defined in the customer journey that every customer experiences once. We research these moments quantitatively with surveys. But what we also do is call customers, and for developing specific products we use panels. On the website we're continuously running A/B tests, so then we measure success in a different way. We basically use all available sources as smartly as possible to understand how satisfied your customers are and also where they think we need to improve."
"We see in the data that people are very satisfied with the self-service options we offer, and then we also see what impact that has on their overall customer satisfaction. We incorporate this into our contact strategy: we want to make all moments that don't actually require personal contact as easy as possible for the customer, so we can free up as much capacity from our service employees as possible for topics that really need to be discussed.
"We have, like many other energy companies, a chat option on the website. With us, the people behind the chat are the same service employees you can reach by phone, but also the people who handle our webcare. So there's no marketing department doing webcare with us. Providing service is really a profession!"
You manage a marketing team. Do your marketers get all that customer data presented to them every day?
"Not every day. We want the customer data to have some 'mass' to it. You can't tackle everything every day. You need to bring focus, and then it's also necessary that something has been measured for a while before you can say whether something is important or not.
"We also listen in with customer service. Some people on my team started at Greenchoice in the call center. There are several who have grown from customer service teams. They really have the customer at the center of their hearts. We all do, but when you know what happens on the phone yourself and what your colleagues discuss with customers, then you're also really able to take ownership. We have company-wide objectives at the highest level on customer satisfaction. That makes it possible for me to steer toward an excellent customer journey."
Is that steering easier because it's been determined from above that customer satisfaction is of decisive importance?
"That it's considered important, I've had influence on that myself. It's all incredibly interconnected. Perhaps the majority of customers come to us because they want sustainable energy, but at some point they increasingly come into contact with our service and don't want to leave Greenchoice anymore, precisely because of that service. A brand in the energy sector doesn't consist of just one dimension. With us there are three: sustainability at the top, high customer satisfaction, and also an energy contract for a fair price."
What plans do you have for the future? What digital innovations are in the pipeline?
"We've launched Boks Live, that's really a product we're going to develop much further. That's high on the agenda.
"In 2014 we completely renewed the website from scratch with a new content management system behind it, and we did that mobile first. I think that was an innovation at the time and we're still reaping the benefits today. Because it still works and because it's intuitive. When you want to tell your message on a small screen, you're forced to make it even easier.
"I think mobile first is a logical starting point. It works and it's more efficient than when you do it the other way around. I think that's totally outdated. I think this also explains why we do so well on mobile in the energy sector in the Digital Excellence Monitor!"
What's your explanation for the fact that the competition is catching up to you on desktop in the Digital Excellence Monitor 2017, compared to last year?
"I think our competition had a bigger catch-up to make on customer experience and that they perhaps focused on desktop and not on mobile. At the same time, we've also kept up with the times and continued optimizing the site, so I can't fully explain that 'catch-up' you see in the numbers..."
How are your (digital) teams organized? What changes or additions were/are needed to achieve digital results?
"Since the beginning of this year, we work completely with scrum from the online marketing department, and the collaboration with our agencies and partners is also organized according to the scrum method. We now have much more of a partnership with our agencies than having a client-agency relationship. We work together in a sprint and that ensures it's much more transparent what you're working on. Stakeholders from outside the marketing team now see much more clearly what's happening with us and what we're delivering. As far as I'm concerned, we're also much more productive because you deliver things more often and because you coordinate more efficiently. For example, the cross-pollination between builders and the designer - those are two parties with us. What you already see happening, also in meetings, is that people dare to be very critical of each other and challenge each other. This ensures that what you deliver also keeps getting better."
Which consumer trends in the industry are high on your agenda to respond to?
"The biggest topic in the energy sector is sustainability and we've been working on that every day for 15 years. From our business strategy, we mainly focus on local sustainability and thus on an energy transition from below. If you establish a local cooperative, you face challenges that we already have experience with and we can help with that. Including with platforms like an administrative dashboard. We very clearly focus on energy saving, on insight into consumption and everything that comes with it.
"Young people, you see this in multiple studies, find it increasingly important that something has purpose. That's part of the purpose movement. When the generation now growing up chooses an energy provider for the first time, there's a good chance they'll demand that it's sustainably generated energy. This is simultaneously the generation that's much less concerned with ownership and has already fully embraced the sharing economy. These are people who, for example, don't want to own a car but share their car, and this is a group we see as future customers.
"I believe that consumers are increasingly so well-informed themselves that they know when something is real and when it's not: consumers see right through it when something presented as 'green' by one of our competitors is actually greenwashing. For a reliable brand, it's incredibly important to do what you say. For us, the challenge lies in telling a bit more about what we do, because there's so much below the surface at Greenchoice that people might not really know about. Ultimately, I also think that a large part of our success is thanks to the fact that we keep our feet on the ground."
What are your biggest challenges in terms of customer experience?
"Where I want to go is being able to offer each individual customer the most relevant content or exactly the right offer at the right moment. So that's about personalization and also about marketing automation. We have 400,000 consumer customers. It's nice to improve that personalization automatically in steps. At the moment we can segment fairly rudimentarily and send certain messages to fairly large groups. My dream is to ultimately be able to approach customers individually through smart use of data and marketing automation platforms without having to think that through manually for each customer. I think if we all put our shoulders to the wheel at Greenchoice, we can manage that.
"Another challenge comes with this: I want to maintain the personal touch. You can call it personalization and strangely enough you're then actually almost doing the opposite. And personal contact, that's something we absolutely don't want to lose.
"Recently I was looking for sustainable sportswear. That's quite difficult to find. I'm convinced that you can vote with your wallet. What you buy reflects what you find important. I find it important that my clothing is produced under good conditions, for people but also for nature.
"In my search I found a start-up that was looking for crowdfunding. Then I participated and I got the clothing in return for that, a Kickstarter-like idea. What they did very well was take you along in the process, so you felt incredibly involved. It all took a bit longer but that didn't matter to me because I felt part of a sort of 'movement' that was making something possible. Eventually I got the items at home, it came in a very nice package that felt like a gift with a personal letter included. Such a personal letter really isn't new anymore, many companies do that, but it still gives extra experience. I find that important to maintain at Greenchoice too. We're enormously valued precisely for our customer service. Also from the employees who do that, and I would really like to integrate that well into such an automated communication approach. That's my ultimate challenge.
"The danger in this competitive energy market is that the emphasis comes to rest far too much on sales and on optimizing your sales funnel. Of course that's important, but it's even more important that the customer experience is good and stays good, and that the website as a whole is in balance. With us that's the case and this is how we differentiate ourselves. I think, by the way, that other providers are increasingly starting to see that. That they've also started paying somewhat more attention to everything around the sales funnel than they used to do."
