Blokker

In 2020 Blokker set themselves a nice, clear ambition: to become the best non-food omni-channel retailer in The Netherlands. At the same time the leadership team concluded that, in order to reach that goal, they had to make serious progress. In September that same year, Martin van Velzen, Director Marketing & E-commerce, asked to help him make a plan that will bring their customers’ brand experience at least on par or, even better, outscore the competition. One of the reasons being the exponential growth in e-commerce sales in the market in general, while Blokker was lagging behind.

Defining the strategic criteria

The commercial growth plan was to contribute to the strategic and top-level goals and objectives. So, it was important to clearly understand the principles. We (rem.: in the research phase I worked together in some areas with specialists of agency The Valley) held interviews with all members of the leadership team, headed by CEO Jeanine Holscher to clearly define the project boundaries.

Understanding the as-is situation

Interviews with a substantial number of stakeholders, both within Marketing and from other departments, provided us with a clear picture of how the digital organization developed within the historically traditional physical retail company, pain points and opportunities for improvement. With regards to both the brand perception (customer experience) in the market and internally concerning the organization, operating model and processes. A good foundation for a expert review.

Quality assessment

Consequently, I performed a quality assessment in a number of areas:

• Status and quality of customer journeys, and related pain points and opportunities.
• Customer experience quality of all digital channels and consumer touch points such as the web shop, marketplace, mobile app, email, social media and SEO/SEA.
• Data infrastructure and current status of CRM implementation.
• Cooperation between different departments within Blokker.
• Status of the Marketing team.

Concrete project roadmap

I translated all insights gathered into concrete projects that will contribute to improvement in customer experience and acceleration in omnichannel sales. And, prioritized all defined projects in a 2021 project roadmap, based on program and business priorities.

A 2021 digital transformation program a.k.a. project roadmap that will contribute to:

• Acceleration in digital transformation and commercial growth.
• Improvement in customer experience, i.e. a better Blokker brand perception of consumers and customers.
• Optimization of the data infrastructure and growth in (quality of) marketing automation campaigns.
• Improvement in operational efficiency and effectiveness through adoption of the agile way of working.
• A Marketing team operating model that better fits the needs of the market and organization.

Due to the Covid-19 impact execution of the project roadmap was temporarily put on hold.