Product Owner and Senior Marketeer
Product Owner
B2C Customer Retention Team
Works in Utrecht and from home
Lives in Maastricht
Works at VodafoneZiggo since 2014
Position: Senior Marketeer
B2C Customer Retention Team
Works in Utrecht and from home
Lives in Rotterdam
Works at VodafoneZiggo since 2016
"Customer retention is an integral part of VodafoneZiggo's mission. Larissa Willems, Senior Marketeer Keep, knows all about it. And Koen Wilmes, Product Owner B2C of the Customer Retention Team, loves to talk about it. "We demonstrate to customers: you're great where you are with VodafoneZiggo."
Koen: "In our highly competitive, fast-moving market, we boast three million Internet customers. But the competition is so fierce that we have to do everything in our power to keep them. Of the 90 marketing professionals I call my colleagues, for instance, no less than 30 are dedicated to maintaining customer satisfaction. At VodafoneZiggo, we approach that task pre-emptively: we use predictive and preventive data analysis to send technicians to visit customers even before a problem arises. Customers really appreciate that."
"To hold on to as many customers as possible, we need to know what they want," Larissa explains. "We have data-driven methods to identify those customer needs and respond on the basis of data from phone calls and visits to our website. We also use predictive models and business cases to identify needs and solutions. We study how cost effective the solutions are and the case for investing in them. Basically, we consider and weigh both the interests of our customers and the organisation. What influence will our plans have on call-centre capacity, for instance? We don't want Customer Contact to be unexpectedly flooded with calls, causing long waits on hold. Maintaining that kind of balance is constantly top of mind."
Koen: “At Customer Retention, we work on some of the most exciting campaigns in the country. Take the massive roll-out in the Netherlands by VodafoneZiggo of Gigabit Internet, which enables download speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s. The campaign to promote our lightning-speed Internet this year coloured the cities of Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Groningen and Leeuwarden orange, one after the other, using posters and banners on bus shelters, trams and social media. It's not often you see a nationwide campaign that strikes a local chord. And just about the entire organisation was involved: PR, Technology, Communications, Marketing and Data. It was wonderful because it allowed us to reach new customers and at the same time confirm to existing ones: you're great where you are with VodafoneZiggo."
Koen continues: "If you're going to claim a moment of the customer's time, then your message has to be relevant and timed to perfection to have the desired effect. To ensure that it is, we test our campaigns thoroughly before going live and monitor feedback from customers in real time - in the basis of clicks in e-mails, for instance. Then, we adjust as required. For no matter how creative an idea is, in the end it's the customer who determines how effective your efforts have been."
Larissa: "Targets and the unpredictability of our work put on the pressure sometimes, because a Marketeer at VodafoneZiggo has a huge sense of responsibility by nature; you know how important your performance is to the organisation as a whole. So there's nothing better than achieving good results: satisfied customers!" Koen agrees: "There's a lot at stake. If something goes wrong, then it tends to go wrong in a big way. We have many customers, after all, and each of them relies on our products and services. But when things go right, it has such a big impact: you turn satisfied customers into fans."
