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How the Digital Experience Dashboard has transformed DELA’s approach to Customer Experience optimization

We set up chats with our dearest clients to discuss the WUA Digital Experience Dashboard’s role in their organization. In this edition: Sjoerd Roders, marketeer at DELA.

How does your job at DELA look? Can you tell us a bit more about your role and the organization you work in?

“DELA was founded more than 80 years ago to ensure a personalized and dignified farewell for its members by insuring and organizing funerals. At DELA we currently have four marketing teams that are working on expanding our propositions and keeping them up to date in order to meet the wishes of our (future) members.

“I work as a marketeer in a team that’s focusing on growing our customer base. That means offering our insurance policies through various channels, especially online. Our other teams focus on the brand or work more on offering our funeral products and services. We also have a team that focuses on improving the service to existing customers.”

What are the challenges you and the teams have to cope with at DELA to accelerate digital growth, and how do you manage?

“The challenge is that like every insurer, we have a lot of work to do in the IT landscape. We have been around for more than 80 years and the world has changed and has become more digital than ever. We’re working hard to keep up with digitalization and the fast-changing digital landscape. We’re determined to keeping our digital products up-to-date and also using new technology to innovate. There is much work to be done, so you have to make choices and prioritize: What do I do now and what do I do later?

“Implementing improvements based on market research or the WUA Dashboard, for example, sometimes has to be put on hold when other big projects come up in the meantime. We often find ourselves having to make a case for how important these improvements are, so we can get the IT-resources we need. The proof is in the A/B testing. That gives us plenty of strong arguments for putting the optimizations in place. And it works great: The increase in volume for insurance applications enables us to prove the value of the business case for the implementation. Other than those indicators, we also look at customer effort score and customer satisfaction score to assess the results of the A/B test and show how it adds value for our customers.”

At DELA, you’ve worked with the Digital Experience Dashboard for a while now. Can you elaborate on your approach?

“In the past, we bought the Web Performance Scan reports from WUA. We always work with a combination of reports, management summaries, and workshops. That’s always worked out really well for us. The reports give you really clear recommendations.

“Now, the Digital Experience Dashboard gave us a new approach, and we were really curious to see how it would work out. The session with your research consultant, Martijn, where we went through everything, really helped me a lot. We carried out some tasks and got to know how to use the Dashboard ourselves.

“The Digital Experience Dashboard gave us a new approach, and we were really curious to see how it would work out.”

“After the onboarding session, I did a deep dive into it myself and started looking not just at the main scores but also zooming in to see the details. What I really liked was that I could just write down a list of the most important topics in my notebook. And I kept checking the open answers: How do they relate to our own scores, but also to the scores of our competitors? I tried to get information out of every aspect of the scores: What are the focal points that stand out? And what exactly are the questions and topics where we didn’t score as well as our competitors? For some of the components, I was able to find detailed answers to these questions.

“For example, we received a lot of feedback from people saying that they didn’t like our typography so much. And of course, that’s important to know, because the last thing you want is for the typography to turn off customers. I consider the typeset to be a fundamental element of your website. It shouldn’t be a distraction for the customer. We were receiving lots of comments about it, and our competitors hardly had any. So, that is definitely something we’re changing. We’re doing research to find out what fonts are better suited to our users.”

You’ve used Sticktail to bring the results and the backlog with insights and next actions into the DELA organization. What was your approach?

“I had made lots of notes on paper in my notebook, and I was looking for a way to share them with the rest of the organization. Sticktail is a tool that helps you to write down your insights. You’ve got observations; the differences in points, for example. And you’ve got facts. You use the facts to formulate your insights. They have a template for that, and that’s how I started putting my insights into words. This tool works well for the rest of the team: People can click through, read the notes, and make comments. The notes have become like little articles, and the read-time in minutes always shows on the screen too.”

What specific topic or feature of the Dashboard has the most value? What do you find most useful or interesting?

“I find the six different tabs in the Dashboard to be the most useful feature. You can click on everything that belongs to the topics. And that is really useful in combination with the open answers, which you can select by facet or by topic. It’s good to do it in this order: first the score, then we look at the questions where we didn’t do as well, and then at the ones where we did better than the competitors. That’s helped us incredibly in the analysis and with finding paths to solutions.”

“We’ve got a huge amount of information out of this research.”

“And one more thing: To me, an important difference between the custom-made Deepdive report and the data-only Dashboard is the usefulness of best practices from other companies and other industries. I notice that if you’re working with the data-only Dashboard without best practices, you focus more on your own website. I think there’s a lot of valuable knowledge we can gain from WUA’s expertise on this topic!”

What results and improvements are you most proud of, using the Digital Experience Dashboard?

“We’ve got a huge amount of information out of the research, and it’s all extremely tangible and usable for addressing the funnels. That’s on the agenda for next year.

“Another thing I want to say is that we are focused on finding out what the overarching orientation process looks like, and how customers make up their minds, even offline. We’re trying to map this out using journal entry research. We want to follow people who are trying to find their way through funeral insurances. We want to gain qualitative insights. So, we’re going to take a step back to get a broader view of the picture. Along with the Dashboard, this will give us a complete view of what and where we need to improve in order to optimize our customer experience!”

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