How To Evolve Your Customer Experience Strategy?

Interview with Maarten Stramrood, Director of Segment and Online Marketing at cable company UPC Nederland.

Maarten Stramrood is the Director of Segment and Online Marketing at UPC Nederland, the biggest cable company in the Netherlands. His role includes the running of the marketing and sales operations as well as the development and maintenance of the website and future releases. The company recently integrated the CRM and segment marketing departments because, Stramrood says, "it's a very efficient way to build up knowledge about our customers both within the onsite and offline area".

Stramrood will be taking part in a panel discussion titled 'Revolutionizing Your Customer Experience By Leveraging Disruptive Technology, Smart, Digital & Social' at the Customer Experience Exchange for Telecoms in London next week. We caught up with him in advance of his appearance to discuss emerging technologies for the CX industry and how UPC Nederland has leveraged digital marketing techniques, such as personalisation, to improve their customer experience and marketing strategy.

CX Network: Thank you very much, Maarten, for joining us today for this interview. What do you think will be the biggest changes impacting the digital marketing industry and customer journey in the next few years?

Maarten Stramrood (MS): "There are a couple of changes, one is within the online care dimension. Online care is still pretty underdeveloped, especially in the telecoms industry.

"The next one is personalisation; 'what does it mean for me as a customer' instead of the mass market approach most telecoms companies still have.

"And the third one is being relevant in the right context. That also has to do with personalisation; if I am in a particular place I have different needs than when I am at home."

CX Network: How do you apply personalisation within UPC?

MS: "We have an approach called online identification, which means that we try to identity as many visitors to our website as possible. We don't want to know who they are, but we try to put them in a predefined segment.

"For example, we have a segment for people who used to be customers and we have a lot of triggers and variables. As soon as we are able to identify someone as an ex-customer, we're able to pinpoint them and change the content on the website and make it more personal, so we could try to persuade them that we have improved our services. Itã's only a tiny bit of content that we change but it makes the message more focused on that particular segment.

"A lot of people also log into our 'my environment' where of course it's easy to personalise the content. And we use a lot of onside and offsite targeting, which is called profiling. For example if people visit the sporting events on our website we profile them as 'sports fans' during their entire journey on the website. And if they come back they will see more sport images on the website than any other customer. They are not aware of it, but if you ask them if they like the website they say that they do."

CX Network: What areas are you looking into developing in the next 12 months?

MS: "Personalised targeting and online care, so making things more relevant within the right context. This will also be our approach within the online care area. If we know you have a particular problem, we will push the content and make it more prominent on the website."

CX Network: So what is the difference between personalisation and online care?

MS: "There is not really a difference, but I would say that personalisation is the technique and online care is for the purpose of the journey of the customer. We use the personalisation technique to make things more focused on a particular visitor."

CX Network: What are some of the new technologies emerging you're looking to utilise within your customer experience and marketing strategy?

MS: "That would definitely be within the data environment, so technologies to use more and more data and have the power to calculate new algorithms.

"And then there is personalisation. The biggest challenge - and some new solutions will emerge in the next few months or years - is multi-device personalisation. People use more devices and it's quite difficult to personalise them on any particular device.

"For example if you're able to identify me on my smartphone it's difficult to also identify my profile on my laptop at home. So how do we connect those two and deliver a consistent experience across all these devices?

"The really big technology companies such as Facebook and Google are doing a lot of things in this area but no-one has found the golden egg yet."