More leads en better client relations

Wageningen University & Research (WUR) is world famous in the area of agricultural science, nature and food. Its mission is ‘To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life.’ WUR numbers 6.500 employees and more than 12.000 students. Next to the university WUR includes nine research institutions performing groundbreaking research for international companies and organizations.

WUR not only performs lots of research, as a university it also has a social function. Through its digital canals lots of questions arrive from it civilians, students, universities, companies and authorities, that have to be qualified by researchers and business developers. The sheer amount can make it difficult to recognize proper 'sales' leads. Which is a problem, because WUR is more and more dependent on self-generated revenues. So they asked us to help analyzing the lead process and to look for improvements in the client contact processes.

For this assignment service designer Melle Broeksma and UX-consultant Arjoen Kikkert formed a team. Between them they have expertise in customer journey mapping, service blueprinting, content marketing and lead generation. In the research phase they conducted interviews with several WUR clients. Together with WUR, in a following set of workshops they've set up personae, a service ecosystem and customer journeys of the acquisition process. The insights are implemented in service blueprints aiming at improvements in the orientation and contact phases.

The customerjourney shows the user experience, pains as well as gains. The client interviews already showed possibilities for improvement in all service phases. This was confirmed in the lead generation and qualification customer journeys.

• Website visitors can't find a way to ask their specific question, they 'abuse' the general question form, overflowing the sales channel with non-sales questions.
• Several organization parts of WUR use different lead processes, not well connected, while the journey of the customer regularly leads along those different organization parts.

WUR required short-term and long-term improvements. In our report we advised:

• Reduce the number of contact persons on wur.nl,
• Send a client-friendly and informative autoreply after someone sends a contac t form,
• Improve the automatic qualification in the contact form, based on a WUR-taxonomy, enabling a better routing of questions,
• Connect to the existing CRM-program and develop an encompassing process for lead generation,
• Start the development of a mutual content marketing strategy.

Doing workshops together has led to a transfer of knowledge between the institutions and a shared vision on the problems and solutions. With this experience, WUR has started making more customer journeys to improve lead generation. Other WUR organizational units have also shown interest in appying customer journeys.