ANWB: Personalized propositions through every touchpoint

The Challenge

In 2016, there were many individual personalisation actions taken at ANWB, all managed by different departments and tools. The customer data (behavioural, product and online) were spread in multiple locations and needed to be centralised in one marketing platform. There was a lack of consistency and relevancy in services and customer communications.

Data for campaign management were not real-time, and the central view of the customer was
missing. Apps were developed on different platforms, and integration between channels was limited. There were a few touchpoints in the sales funnel where customers had to fill in their data from scratch, which was not desirable.

The Goal

To offer customers seamless accessibility and relevant propositions for products, services and societal topics via digital and non digital channels. For every member, the right proposition, at the right time, via the right touchpoints.

The Solution

ANWB wanted to create one personalisation strategy that would provide seamless customer experiences to their members. Three years ago, their digital transformation journey began. They created multidisciplinary teams across departments to work Agile on one vision and one roadmap.

Crystalloids became part of the transformation process from the beginning. Joining their multidisciplinary team, we supported ANWB in four areas:

1. architecture analysis of data and applications
2. personalisation project
3. KNIME analytics platform implementation
4. the adoption of Data Ops.

1. Customer interaction IT architecture analysis and plan

To determine the CRM landscape that supports customers through their entire journey, Crystalloids teamed up with ANWB to conduct a thorough SWOT analysis of their customer interaction business processes, applications and supporting technologies. Based on the analysis ANWB decided to adopt:

• Best-of-Suite strategy: Single suite for omnichannel campaign management, one analytical platform for the entire CRM domain, a single CMS, an integrated solution for call-centre and physical shops
• Cloud Data Platform (Paas) and Cloud Data Lake (Paas)
• Open architecture based on APIs, ESB, BPM
• Minimise custom-made work, make use of standard platforms

2. Personalisation

Data is an essential element in ANWB’s personalisation vision. To integrate all data and applications at a central location, ANWB opted for a cloud data warehouse which allowed for high performance, reliability, and near-universal connectivity for the mission-critical business processes.

Creating a unified customer journey is a key goal for many companies. For ANWB, it meant delivering target group propositions across multiple channels, example product recommendations for business travel and retail business lines, via email, website and apps. In addition to this, providing personalised content on the website and site-search results improving customer recognition (CIAM).

Relevant propositions can be shared by integrating behavioural and member profile data in the cloud. Near real-time updated data from internal and external sources ensures more relevance, predicting engagement and conversion behaviour more accurately.

ANWB is now able to recognise, acknowledge and hence offer a better, personalised customer experience across seven channels. When deploying content, a matrix with categories, recent behaviour and interests determines what is the most relevant content for email newsletter recipients and just the most relevant content is being displayed. 

Depending on members’ interest and purchases, they are pointed to the topics that are most relevant to them on the website. When members browse the internet, ANWB does not display banners with products that they already purchased, so that they are not unnecessarily bothered. If members indicate that they are not interested in a proposition, this proposition will expire in all seven channels simultaneously.

3. Implementing KNIME analytics platform

After assessing ANWB’s Customer Intelligence environment, it was decided to replace the KXEN tooling with the KNIME Analytics Platform. KNIME offered several crucial advantages for ANWB:

• A powerful suite of analytical functionalities, including integration with popular scripting languages ​​such as Python and R.
• Easy installation of the server version on ANWB’s cloud technology and connection to their new marketing database
• Graphical User Interface that can facilitate so many types of users
• Lower license costs other packages

The installation and data configuration took place in the user environment at ANWB. The next step was to become proficient with KNIME and to test the quality of the models. Crystalloids assisted in setting up the data connections and defining a suitable data dump to be able to build high-quality models. During this phase, we were also working on a blueprint and roadmap for the desired end-state.

In the last phase, our data scientists contributed and guided in building a “model factory” that helped the ANWB team minimise manual work on scoring, get sufficient insight into quality models and connect the model scores for business activation. Model factory allows for all models to be automatically updated and deployed using machine learning.

4. Data Ops

To realise agile customer information architecture, Crystalloids helped ANWB adopt the DataOps approach. DataOps is a series of data management principles to increase velocity, reliability, and quality of data analytics. This methodology allows organisations to combine access to information for the employees that consume data and those that provide them. With DataOps, ANWB can determine which data and insights have the highest priority and should be developed first.