In the Digital Excellence Monitor 2017, bol.com is number 1 in the retail industry. In this interview, a conversation with Maurice Jongerius, Manager Product Development at bol.com. About the non-stop race between growing customer expectations and what you as a company can offer, about agile working, making mistakes and learning from them, home speakers, mixed reality and Artificial Intelligence.
Congratulations on winning the Digital Excellence Monitor 2017, Maurice Jongerius. How do you and your team maintain control over the quality of your customer experience? What do you think are the ingredients for digital success?
"First of all, we are naturally very grateful for this recognition from our customers. We are very aware that we must continue to do our best every day to make customers choose us again. The internet gives consumers the opportunity to easily compare offerings themselves. So customers are only limitedly loyal online. You have to earn the customer's choice anew every day. That keeps us extra sharp and motivated to want to do better and better.
"The quality of our customer experience cuts across all teams and processes. We therefore look at both the entire customer journey and individual parts within it. We apply continuous optimization and believe that we can improve small steps that together result in a better customer experience. We don't strive for complete control, we are a learning organization. This is reflected in the way we give teams the space to take their own initiatives.
Having autonomous teams with a clear goal in mind is essential for collective success. We work hypothesis-driven and try to validate hypotheses as quickly as possible. You're allowed to make wrong choices at bol.com; learning from them is our priority. In addition, we naturally seek collaboration with customers by listening in with our customer service and conducting user research with customers. We also have our over 1300 colleagues share all their experiences as customers within the organization, via our internal community platform.
"We are an open organization where all colleagues are informed about how KPIs like NPS and revenue are doing. We share a lot of knowledge and information with each other, share both good and less good news. This makes colleagues very aware of whether our customers choose us or not and also whether they recommend us to others."
What plans do you have for the future, what digital innovations are in the pipeline?
"We have recently taken a number of steps in the area of 'subscription models' such as the ebook subscription Kobo Plus, our delivery subscription Select and Bespaar Continu to get repeat purchases with discounts. We believe that customers will increasingly value these types of convenience and advantageous offerings at a fixed price. We will therefore continue to develop this further in the coming years. We naturally do this by optimally deploying the available data, to the customer's advantage.
"We know that the way customers search with image and voice will take off in the near future. We are already preparing ourselves for this because it is a fundamentally different way of searching. This brings a number of technological and functional challenges that we naturally want to make a difference in. So we look carefully at the opportunities that Artificial Intelligence has to offer.
"As we head towards 2018, we remain enormously focused on serving our mobile customers even better. It is already the largest group of customers, of which the app users are even the 'best' bol.com customers. The battle for loyal customers is won on mobile, so we will continue developing there at full speed."
What does the structure of your (digital) teams look like? What changes or additions were/are needed to achieve digital results?
"We started working agile within our scrum teams back in 2009. Over time, we have added more and more autonomy and goal setting to that. We once started with our IT teams with the motto You build it, You run it, You love it and we are now rolling that out further to the entire organization.
By forming teams across departments with all disciplines on board to work together for success within their own goal area, we now stand on the eve of further steps. When we start from a problem or goal, we notice that each individual expert can have a different view on possible approaches, but that combining perspectives leads to the best hypotheses.
"It is important that we get the right goals clear at a strategic level and all teams can contribute to them in their own way. That brings freedom and at the same time responsibility. That is the best breeding ground for creativity that contributes to an even better experience for the customer. Our digital teams therefore operate throughout the entire organization and in various multidisciplinary teams, to achieve specific goals.
"To form those teams, we also notice that it is challenging to attract new talent at high speed. There is scarcity in data science and IT development, among others, so we like to make it as interesting as possible for potential new colleagues to put their talent into practice at bol.com. We do this through our Young professional program, where we train new people ourselves and actively promote our vacancies on our WerkenBij website.
Enormous amounts of data, customer and product knowledge are ready at bol.com for professionals to work with and deploy this valuably for our customers."
What are your biggest challenges in the area of customer experience?
"It's really a non-stop race between growing customer expectations and what you as a company can offer. We cannot afford to sit still or let attention to the customer slip. We also feel that as one of the leading retail players, we have the opportunity to help shape the retail landscape and set standards in terms of even faster delivery, assortment, prices, product information and customer service.
Because we are a shopping platform where different parties manage a piece of the chain, we focus enormously on quality from everyone who contributes. We help our partners realize that they too have a major influence on the customer experience.
"We further strive for a combination of qualitative and quantitative goals when it comes to customer experience. Good conversion or revenue only tells part of the story. One of the challenges for us is combining hard KPIs with the feeling that our brand evokes in customers to know if we really make customers happy. Then it's about the way of communicating, the proximity as a local player, whether we're there for you when the experience disappoints and understanding our culture and dealing with it correctly. This requires empathy and also courage from our people when it comes to trying new things and that is a constant challenge."
At which company or organizations have you recently had an excellent (digital) customer experience? What did you learn from it?
"I was on vacation in Spain last summer just before roaming within the EU ended. Like many Dutch people, I had had that frustration with being online abroad for years, but my vacation came just too early to already benefit from the new rules. I decided to ask my provider T-Mobile via Twitter if they could help me as a customer with 16 years of history. Within half an hour I had a nice response back and got a free EU data bundle directly credited to my account and this was also immediately visible in my T-Mobile app. The two elements that appealed to me were the quick direct contact via Twitter and of course the real-time approach that was offered. In my opinion, an example of customer-oriented digital service."
Which consumer trends in the industry are high on your agenda to respond to?
"Consumers order online in increasingly more different shopping categories and thus the need for the right inspiration, information or advice becomes increasingly varied. Where you used to sell a book and a DVD in the same way, you now have to take into account the differences between a washing machine and baby clothes or a bag of potting soil. We want to offer customers an optimal shopping experience from the start of the search that fits the type of article the customer is looking for and naturally on the device of choice.
"In essence, customers want to be unburdened around their orders and payments, but at the same time they also want overview and control. We already offer insight into the status of your order via our chatbot Billie, via push notifications in the app and email. In addition, we want to further develop the self-service domain for customers, so that you are really decisive in the offered choices.
Personally, I look with great interest at all developments around Artificial Intelligence, home speakers and mixed reality. Bol.com is a company that wants to participate at the top of innovation, but also doesn't blindly jump on every tech trend. It's important for us that there is a customer question, or we can make a difference for millions of customers at once, or that we create the customer question. We are going to significantly expand our knowledge and expertise in the field of data science because we see that we are already making significant gains in operational and innovation areas. Think of automatically tagging duplicate images, removing watermarks, automatically filling in product specifications, improved product recommendations and making predictions about sales that still lie in the future."
