Speaking: Ben Vloon from Crowd and Company

Ben has always worked on the business development and marketing side and almost always at international organizations that sell complex technology. Crowd and Company started 10 years ago and focuses primarily on bringing together organizational promise and customer experience. We spoke with Ben about digital transformation and the necessary acceleration within companies to improve customer experience.

Ben: 'By following customer processes more consciously as a customer, I have become aware of how companies actually perform in the competition. That interested me. Is what organizations promise also experienced by the customer? If those two things don't match, you get crooked faces. 'I ordered something different or I expected a different service' are statements you don't want to hear from your customers, and those are the decent variants. Or customers who drop out. Vote with their wallets. Bringing that promise and experience together is what I continuously strive for.'

“In my view, FAQs are band-aids for broken processes. Making an FAQ obsolete should be a goal. Everything you do as an organization must be so good and clear so that that need no longer exists. Therein lies the challenge. Continuously improve. Every day."

Mission, people, brand and added value

'The customer value for the customer must be in balance with the return of the organization. You can build entire spreadsheets on that. But it is mainly about four components that you as an organization must be aware of: mission, people, brand and added value. That's where it starts. You have to be so clear that every member of your management team writes down the same thing when I ask what that mission is. If the management team writes down eight different missions, then the team they manage also has eight different perceptions of what the company does. This translates directly to the customer experience.

Looking at how your customers want to be helped in a different way

'You must take the mission, people, brand and added value into account when designing your customer journey and the communication within that customer journey. Your digital interaction with customers is crucial for a good customer experience. I see this as an important tool that is becoming more important for an increasingly large (or growing) group of people. Now take this example: I'm not going to teach my parents a lot of things anymore. But I'm not going to unlearn a lot of things from my children. The people that I will soon serve as an organization no longer want to speak to me by telephone. So you will have to look at how they want to be helped in a completely different way and you have to prepare for that now.'

Three striking trends in digital customer interaction

'I see various trends in this. Consider, for example, the shift towards more and more images and short texts instead of very complex texts. The influence of social media on the various communication styles is increasingly reflected in the field of digital customer interaction. The letter of the past with a lot of text is being replaced by high-quality UX in the form of moving or stationary images and short, understandable texts.

But I also see, for example, that the medium is sometimes confused with the use of the medium. For example, elderly people with an iPad are not necessarily digitally literate. They use the medium in a different way than people in their thirties. And very slowly that is shifting. Unconscious ignorance of use slowly becomes conscious knowledge of use. My parents use digital technology passively (things come to them), thirty-somethings use digital technology interactively and context sensitively. Communication consumption shifts along with the age categories. You have to keep a close eye on that distinction, because it is constantly shifting.

The trend I also see is that more and more people have less reading comprehension. The level of literacy is not exactly increasing. Low literacy is a fact for 2 million people. That's a lot of people. We as companies are not going to solve that problem. But we can help them within the context of a story, a quest or the desire to get something done. By looking at customer interaction in a different way, we can explain things very differently to a specific group.

Partnership par excellence

'The gist of what I'm saying? It's about being aware of your customers' 'job to be done' and taking action on it. The combination of the right technology for digital customer interaction and the front end – the vision and strategy development – ​​is the magic. That's the gist.

And how do you achieve this? That's where Dialog Group and we at Crowd and Company always find each other. Dialog Group's technology fully supports this. And that collaboration is always about wanting to deliver the best to the customer under the motto 'the right customer value at the table at the right time'.

Is the challenge first on strategy and vision development and only then on technology? No problem. It is never about spending hours, but always about meeting customer needs. What are the customer's needs now and are we at the right time with the right offer? Clear for the customer, and very pleasant to work with for ourselves. That is partnership par excellence.

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