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Cindy Kroon (Nuon): “Who knows what would happen if we had an NPS of +22?

In the eyes of potential customers, Nuon is the number one in the WUA online orientation study of taking out an energy contract from November 2016. This interview is a chat with Cindy Kroon, vice president customers BtC at Nuon (part of Vattenfall Group). About Big Data, customer-driven marketing, NPS targets, and clustering teams around customer journeys during a large reorganisation.

Cindy Kroon, congratulations on winning this WUA study. How important is it for you to be the best in the digital arena? What is the role of having a winning mentality in this?

“If this WUA study shows that our site makes customers happy, that makes us happy too. Especially if you win this prize twice in a row, that’s amazing. The online team was super enthusiastic, and rightly so. If you want to be a customer-oriented company, you need to win customer prizes: only customers decide whether we’re allowed to be satisfied or not! We very clearly communicated to the market that we listen to our customers well. Instead of trying to persuade people and sell our products, we want to hear what customers really think is important, and we want to offer solutions that are different than what they’re used to.

“We know that we cannot sit still. We mainly won this study due to our high findability. I think we also need to win on the customer experience themes and get the highest scores in the market. For us, it is also about consumers being enthusiastic after having found us. The best thing for us is that they tell other people about their positive experiences. Because: I could set winning WUA studies as a goal, but for me it’s an intermediate goal. My ultimate goal is greater: my goal is to become the most recommended energy supplier in The Netherlands. And for that, you need enthusiastic customers.”

What is your approach, what is going so well? What could other directors and digital sales leaders learn from your approach?

“We have a very professional team, with really good people. They can think as well as take action, that’s what we’ve implemented across our entire organisation. Under my supervision, we re-subscribed our organisation in October 2015, and I then became responsible for the commercial part as well as customer service. This is when we said goodbye to silos, marketing departments, and service departments: we reorganised with the customer in mind, and I started clustering people around customer journeys. The only team that hasn’t been clustered yet, is the online team. Wilco Spaargaren (online sales manager at Nuon, MvdB) and I are trying to work out what would be the best possible future for this team, and how the talents could flourish to their full potential.

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“This reorganisation means that everyone is listening to customers from their own area of expertise. Everywhere, we’re beginning to see that we have started to act really quickly. We’re working agile throughout the organisation, we’re lean and multidisciplinary. First we listen, then we think, and then we act. We learn, adapt, and try again. It isn’t rocket science: we look at the daily movements of our customers, and we learn from them. For online we no longer make yearly plans, we make quarterly plans at the most. You shouldn’t look too far ahead, and if in doubt, just do it.

“We need to dare to take action, because we have the genuine intention to make things better for the customer. And I don’t mind if we then make errors and learn from that. The criterion is that you can explain it to customers. If you learn and adapt, that’s not an error by the way, it’s development. Making errors because you’re not thinking or because you’re careless is not okay however, I really hate that…”

From a consumer perspective, there shouldn’t be a difference (anymore) between service and sales. It looks like you have been able to break through those silos already. How did that work in practice, how do you control it?

“I have a very nice job. I am solely ultimately responsible for both sales and service on Nuon’s consumer side (including SME). For the customer, there is no distinction between sales and service at Nuon. More than ever before, our customers experience us as a single entity, and we have structured the organisation accordingly. From internal management, I can obviously tell that ‘sales creatures’ are different creatures than ‘service creatures’. For a long time, I tried to create golden geese, but those will never make up the bulk of your staff. So, of course I make a distinction between sales and service when it comes to running the organisation, but these two types do have a common primary goal: customer satisfaction with a high NPS as a result.

“We carried out the reorganisation really quickly, and it was actually quite a fluid transition. So far, approximately 80-90% of the changes have been implemented. By mid-December 2015, everyone was in the right place. We had set several key targets, 100% customer focus being the most important one. We are now growing again in terms of market share after months of stability, last year’s sales targets were reached. And within one year we managed to improve our NPS, going from -22 to almost 0, which is a fantastic result.”

What is the role of customer research and customer focus in your daily work and with the teams you are responsible for?

“We structured the entire organisation around the customer, and within it, we stopped thinking for the customer. Every day, we use customer data to determine the priorities, and the type of data can vary from one-on-one calls with our customer service desk to larger Big Data projects. We have 2 million customers, so we need to start linking all this data now. Everywhere on the website we use feedback tooling, and we make extensive use of A/B testing. We want to work towards two million unique customer journeys, and of course that involves automation and customer-driven marketing.

“We used to run large campaigns based on segments and personas. Now, in addition to a few larger campaigns, we run hundreds of campaigns per day based on individual customer behaviour. Several customers could start from the same campaign, but based on their interaction with for example email, they could end up taking different ‘routes’. What we do is very data-driven, but also highly actionable. Our customers do sometimes tell us that they feel the personalisation is a bit much, that we get too close. So we’re experimenting, we start small and learn from it. Some customers appreciate it, whilst others think it’s intrusive.”

What KPIs do you use for digital, which knobs do you usually twist in order to excel digitally?

“NPS is the KPI that transcends everything at Nuon. Whether you’re working in sales or in service, you’ll be working on the offline or on the online channels of our business. Wilco’s digital team works with derived KPIs, the main four are CTR, conversion rate, drop-out rate, and task completion rate. The knobs we’re twisting are, of course, our propositions: what works and what doesn’t, based on NPS and the four digital KPIs?”

What are your biggest digital challenges for 2017?

“We are dealing with an ever-increasing amount of data. For me, the challenge for the coming years lies in channelling Big Data applications and determining the relevance of the contribution for each channel therein. Applying the insights from this multitude of data streams, and really take action based on customer needs, that is our challenge. We want to move towards a one-on-one customer experience, and technology is the key component in this.”

“Traditionally all media agencies provide figures regarding the effectiveness of campaigns. We want to see: how does a commercial influence how customers view us? We want to link everything, and that’s an incredibly difficult task that you could call part of the omnichannel challenge. It all comes down to the same thing: How can you model large organisations in such a way that you make your individual customers feel like you know them? This has been a topic in the market for a long time, but I can now see that the developments are beginning to accelerate, we’re actually making it a reality.

“When I became responsible for sales, I presumed that marketers would have been working from data and customer behaviour for some time. Yet I saw that much was being done based on experience and gut feeling. At the time, I presumed that a lot more would have been automated, but I can see that this is actually happening now. Classic marketing positions are disappearing, classic campaign teams are disappearing. Digital marketers are becoming customer journey experts. It’s very inspiring being this close to these developments and being a part of it.

“Yet for me the old-fashioned business challenge remains: converting the multitude of possibilities into relevance, and setting priorities. As long as you’re high up enough in the chain, you can make a lot of decisions, but these need to be supported by data, and at the same time you’ll still need to choose because you can’t do everything. I need to try to keep things small and not get overwhelmed by it. I’ve seen people get lost. I’m talking to a lot of colleagues in the profession who are increasingly confounded by Big Data.”

What (digital) innovations are you currently working on, and what developments are on your roadmap?

“The summary remains: we are strategically aiming at listening to our customers. In our (potential) customers’ journeys we need to be functionally relevant, and the challenge is to add a ‘wow’ factor to this. We want to get people excited, also outside the functional areas that have to do with taking out an energy contract or the service that goes with it. Think about moving house, for example. This always causes stress. If you’ve been a Nuon customer for over 30 years, and you’ve notified us that you are moving, how nice would it be if we were to arrange for a cleaning company to come to your old or new home to give it a good clean? Or if Nuon would deliver moving boxes to your house at a time that suits you? How nice it is to be truly relevant to customers rather than just giving them a special deal on a tablet?”

What is your ultimate goal and dream in the business area?

“My big dream is for us to become and remain the most recommended energy supplier in The Netherlands. That is what we’re aiming for. We’re going to surprise people, and this can be achieved by listening to what they truly care about. I like to make customers happy and surprise them. As an energy company, we’re selling service and unburdening. Who knows what would happen to us as an organisation and to our business if we had an NPS of +22?”

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