Digital Customer Experience Takeaways from an Old Church Site in Amsterdam

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Earlier this month we had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the annual event held in Amsterdam – Unleashing Digital Customer Experience (DCX). It is a running theme that has been crossing all industries and sectors, as the importance of paying attention to your customers and attending to their priorities and attention is becoming paramount.

During the event, many topics came to the fore, including how to maximize co-working and collaboration within all our organizations, where high-quality DCX involves several departments. Additionally and related to the first point, how is it best presented and engaged with the senior leadership and c-suite in our organizations to maximize the investments and deployments of programs in this space? Lastly, where can automation help and how can teams stay one step ahead with modern approaches, e.g. AI and better leveraging of Social Media?

The event was well attended and the venue is always a fun place, by the canals in Amsterdam’s city center. While the mix of nationalities and industry sectors present always adds plenty of colors and diverse perspectives that make all the presentations interesting and rewarding to attend.

Industry events sometimes are susceptible to repetition and the mundane. To combat that, workshops work very well. This year we also took part in several workshops, which were spread across two days. The themes there were – ROI (return on investments) models and how to make to most of those. Another one was how to build a plan to make the most of your go-to-market plans and intentions. In that context, the discussion revolved around what role Digital Customer Experience and Omnichannel play, where are the typical challenges, and what were the various experiences and recommendations of participants.

At Course5, we work with many Forture500 and other international organizations, thus we relished adding our findings and perspectives to these discussions. Data analytics runs through all these themes, and understanding best practices and smart distribution of resources can make all the difference.

Lastly, some anecdotal takeaways include:

• Amsterdam is even more charming at 07:00 am in the morning when the streets are empty and lone riders cross paths on their bicycles
• The venue is a church on Keizersgracht which had been the scene of a famous Dutch talk show in the 90s
• The panel discussion had a key conclusion: start small and show results early, before allocating massive budgets
• A good approach to tackle such projects is through Design Thinking. Gather a reasonable amount of people (2 pizza rule) for X amount of time in a room and encourage them to come up with solutions to problems that are based on direct customer feedback

Let’s keep talking and learning.