BrazilEurope's top 10 companies for digital customer experience
In today’s competitive landscape, offering a seamless and end-to-end customer experience – enabled by a state-of-the-art digital backbone – is more important than ever. Meet Europe's top 10 companies for digital customer experience.
In its Digital Leaders study, consulting firm BearingPoint benchmarked the digital maturity of the sales & marketing operation of nearly 400 companies across seven markets: Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK. The research found that, from a geographical perspective, leading Dutch and Nordic companies have a clear digital edge, outperforming their peers on most facets of the customer landscape.
Europe’s top two players are in fact ecommerce platforms from the Netherlands: Coolblue and Bol.com. Both platforms have been able to compete successfully with the likes of giant Amazon, in part due to Amazon’s relatively late arrival in the Netherlands, but also on the back of their excellence in digital operations according to BearingPoint.
Coolblue today generates nearly €1.5 billion in revenues, while Bol.com, founded in 1999 by Germany’s Bertelsmann, generates to the tune of €2.8 billion in sales. These two Dutch players managed to rank ahead of a host of much larger brands in Europe, including Zara from Spain, Marks & Spencers and Tesco from the UK, AXA from France and Telenor from Norway.
To come to their findings, the researchers looked at performance on four main factors: digital marketing (how mature are the digital marketing channels?), digital product experience (to what extent are customers offered a fully digital customer journey for their product?), ecommerce (how mature are the online channels?) and e-CRM (the degree of sales automation and personalisation).
The top five is rounded off by lingerie brand Hunkemöller (also based in the Netherlands), Norwegian telecom company Telia and Dutch high street retailer HEMA. The top ten further consists of Telecom (Italy), Telenor (Norway), Meny (Norway), Ocado (UK) and Elkjøp (Norway).
From a sector perspective, retail is the most digitally mature industry closely followed by telecom and banking, while across the dimensions explored, digital product experience is the best performing aspect, followed by ecommerce.
According to BearingPoint’s researchers, the Covid-19-induced downturn has made digital maturity an unambiguous necessity for businesses from all sectors. “A strategy of digitalisation which covers all dimensions is the optimal approach to achieve digital excellence and help companies adapt and respond to a constantly changing business landscape,” said Eric Conway, a partner at BearingPoint.
