ANWB personalization case nominated for the DDMA Customer Data Award

As one of the final three nominees, ANWB is running for a chance to win the DDMA Customer Data Award 2020. This award is given to organizations that manage to apply customer data at an operational, tactical and strategic level most successfully. And ANWB certainly achieves this. We have interviewed Emiel Begthel, Manager personalization at ANWB, to share their personalization story.

The top priority is our 4.7m members

Three years ago, there were many personalization actions taken at ANWB, all managed by different departments and tools. There was a lack of consistency and relevancy in services and communication towards the customers. 

"The most important part of ANWB's strategy is our members," explains Emiel. "Offering a personalized customer experience meant we needed to start working together and take one approach towards personalization. We created multidisciplinary teams across departments to work Agile on one vision and one roadmap. This new way of working allows our members to experience the maximum individual and social value of ANWB."

The biggest challenge was people's mindset

"At first, there were many individual personalization initiatives per department; it was very fragmented. For email, we had several email experts through the organization that worked with three different email tools which led to some internal disagreements. 

The customer data (behavioural, product and online) were spread in multiple locations and needed to be centralized in one marketing platform. We wanted to change that and create one personalization organization. The biggest challenge we had was around internal transformation, people's mindset and the way of working. We had to put a lot of effort into breaking the organizational structure." says Emiel.

The omnichannel personalization 

ANWB is now able to provide personalized propositions across seven different channels (email, website, mobile app, store, customer service, magazine Kampioen and Ads) without displaying products that members might already have purchased before.  

"When members interested in cycling visit the website, we point them to free legal advice on damage caused by injuries. When members with a cycling-pass call the customer service, we inform them about a free bicycle check. When members use the Holiday Aid App, we remind them what is required when travelling to the country of destination.

Crystalloids' contribution 

As early as 2015, Crystalloids helped to build the cloud architecture for the Personalization Vision and contributed to breaking through the organizational silos at ANWB. To determine the most relevant proposition for each member, Crystalloids introduced and implemented Knime technology which covers all kinds of data analytics functionality. Today, ANWB continuously runs 40 models based on 200 algorithms in their model factory, to improve the most relevant propositions.

The ever personalized future

"We have gone a long way to get where we are, but there is always room for improvement. At ANWB, we focus on three workstreams: relevant propositions, personalized channels and preconditions. Proposition means offering the right value proposition to the right customer in the right channels at the right moment to help our customers in many ways. And as for personalized touchpoints, we provide personalized experiences in 7 touchpoints and improve them every day based on data. The preconditions are all about the organization, good quality of data and tools" Emiel explains.

Why it all matters

"The Customer Data Award is important to us for two reasons. First, we want to honour all the work and people that contributed to the success of the Personalization project. Second, we want to promote ANWB as a data-driven company to all the talents out there and recruit more smart people to help us further on our journey." concludes Emiel.

The Customer Data Award night event

If you would like to learn all about the nominees and the keynotes, see more information about the DDMA’s Award here. The Customer Data Award Night was supposed to take place on March 19 but has currently been put on hold following the safety instructions from the government around the coronavirus.