Jan Zwang – VodafoneZiggo

Jan Zwang is Senior Market & Customer Insights Manager at VodafoneZiggo, a Dutch provider of television, internet, and telephony. VodafoneZiggo was formed in 2017 following a merger between the Dutch operations of Liberty Global and Vodafone. In his role, Jan is responsible for all market research in the Consumer & Enterprise market. Together with his team, he delivers high quality and agile insights to the entire organisation. Last year, VodafoneZiggo was awarded as the Best Marketing Company of the Netherlands by the Dutch Marketing Awards.

FINGER ON THE PULSE

Data helps the company achieve greater customer satisfaction, better technical performance, and a smarter work rhythm. Within this process, Jan underlines the importance of frequent measurements: “For example, we measure the Network NPS for Vodafone every day across a sample of ten thousand people. From one day to the next, the NPS score could fluctuate ten, sometimes even fifteen points, whilst nothing is happening in our network. On a monthly average, you don’t see those fluctuations. When the pandemic started, our NPS score went up on that first day, as people appreciated the good network connection at home. When you don’t measure continuously, you miss those changes and end up drawing the wrong conclusions. As a brand, we are almost continuously on tv or radio, so it is very important to keep your finger on the pulse. We very consciously measure our campaigns based on Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow. We look at Category Entry Points and let the people in the surveys tell us how they look at something. We think 5G is important, but that doesn’t mean the customer shares that belief. That is also an important part of doing good research. If you look at the data, you must always do so from the perspective of the consumer or business customer, and that can be difficult. That is an important reason we use pre-testing.”

personalised messaging

Personalised marketing is the core of the company’s approach. VodafoneZiggo bases its offer very accurately on what it knows about the customer: this makes it possible to approach him or her at the right time and via the right channel with the right message. Jan: “You see more and more personalisation in the market. In the past, you would get the neighbourhood paper and it would contain offers from the local shops. Now, everyone gets a different mailing. When you log on to Bol.com or Amazon, you are reminded of the items in your shopping basket. On our Ziggo TV box, you can set four profiles and indicate your preferences for sports, series, music, whatever your interests. As there are increasingly more data available, our media mix modelling is also getting better. You can incorporate people’s digital fingerprints, but also brand KPIs, NPS figures, media spend, sales trends, even how busy it is in the shops. It is all interrelated.”

all about the people

According to Jan, a good data-driven model stands and falls with the capabilities of the team: “The people are what differentiate us. Of course, our marketing automation approach also contributes to that, but people and knowledge of the market remain essential. Think of your car navigation. The internet is full of people blindly following the route and ending up in the wrong way. You should always use your common sense, and that applies to all models. The brand feel is hard to capture in algorithms. We are getting better at predicting and optimising through testing, but there will always be exceptions. What works for many doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.”

“A prerequisite for being data-driven is that it needs to be embedded in the entire organisation, it doesn’t just involve the insights department.”

data as part of the company

Jan shares that working data-driven is woven into the strategy of VodafoneZiggo. Jan: „Everyone that joins the company is trained in this way of working. You need more than a market research budget. A prerequisite for being data-driven is that it needs to be embedded in the entire organisation, it doesn’t just involve the insights department. All departments, from IT, to sales, to customer service, are trained to see if data is used and whether it is validated. Everything must be viewed from the customer’s perspective. This is especially difficult to do in a tech company. I could ask what you are going to do with 5G, but you might not know the answer, because you don’t know what it entails. But you do have an underlying need, and it is our job to uncover that.”

agile way of working

“When we became VodafoneZiggo in 2017, the data-driven strategy was implemented from day one”, Jan continues. “Agile working was then followed to respond faster to data through improvement loops. We can send out a survey at 16.00 and have the first results by 20.00. If you have three ideas and want to know which one is the best, you can make an educated guess based on experience, or you can validate it. Most of the time, it gets better from there. A lot of data is useless if you can’t use it. You work continuously on your planning so you can act when something happens in the market. You don’t always know what your competitor does, but in that way of working, we are already a lot further. Working data-driven in an agile process and ensuring you collaborate with companies that can absorb that, results in maximum value.”

privacy is a high priority

As a modern organisation, you have to gain the trust of your customers so they are open to share data with you. If customers see the advantage, they are willing to do so. As a result, privacy is high on the agenda, Jan: “To use customer data, you must know what you can and can’t do, and if you can even use it. It has to do with legislation, but also with ethics. Because of this, we have a dedicated privacy officer. Privacy is also important for the trust we built with our customers. It is an important precondition if you want to become and remain a data-driven organisation. One-to-one messaging with a customer must be relevant, so it would help if we knew your interests, but you must permit that. We believe in that reinforcing effect. The more relevant we are to you, the more you appreciate us. This way, we know to talk about Smart Wi-Fi to one customer, whilst we talk about sports to the other. But in the end, you have to deliver on your customer promise for every customer every day.”