Netafim builds loyalty-driven customer relationships based on Effortless Experiences

Headquartered in Israel, Netafim has grown to become the world leader in precision agriculture over the last six decades. With the slogan ‘to help the world grow more with less’ and customers in 25 countries, the company develops irrigation solutions that are ever more effective while requiring less water. As such, they play a vital role in securing the future of agriculture in the face of climate change and resource scarcity. 

Completing the customer journey

“Over the last three to four years, we have placed a lot of focus on our customer experience,” explains Omer Gerson, director of Digital, Analytics and Innovation at Netafim. “As part of this focus, we kicked off an earlier project with delaware to structure our digital marketing approach, including the implementation of a new website, marketing automation tools and a number of other solutions.”

But one year ago, Omer and his team felt that Netafim still had an incomplete understanding of the customer journey, which led to a widening of its collaboration with delaware. “We wanted to broaden the scope of the previous project and to  get insights in all of the different touchpoints between Netafim, dealers and farmers. Our goal in this is to create a full 360-degree view of each customer.

Roadmap towards Effortless Experience

One of the first things the delaware team did to shed light on the customer experience was to map the customer journey by interviewing Netafim customers – both dealers and farmers – from different business units and markets around the world.

“Thanks to this exercise, we were able to achieve a validated, thorough picture of the customer experience, which served as the input for our transformation project,” Omer continues. “We collaborated closely with delaware to refine key building blocks for improved customer experience and to build a highly structured roadmap. This roadmap consists of business process improvements as well as systems and architecture that must be implemented to support the redesigned customer experience.”

“The roadmap adresses four strongly interconnected dimensions of transformation,” explains Laurence Vandelanotte, senior digital strategist at delaware digital.  “The first one is adoption. Without improving adoption – on the side of dealers and farmers, but also internally at Netafim – a successful transformation process is very unlikely.” 

“The second dimension concerns data collection, particularly finding new avenues to connect with end customers directly or through dealers. The third dimension focuses on the upscaling and optimization of existing touch points, while the fourth is all about experimenting new innovations. To define the right priorities and align them with customer expectations, we applied our Effortless Experience methodology, which is aimed at creating continuously frictionless customer interactions.” 

From sales and marketing to customer service – and beyond

“What was interesting about this project is that while it started out with the goal of boosting the customer experience, it quickly evolved beyond that,” adds Laurence Vandelanotte. “This is because transforming the customer experience isn’t possible without looking at the entire customer-facing organization, develping internal capabilities and investing in digital tools to ensure that the experience is consistent across all platforms.”

Today we have a hands-on and realistic roadmap that takes the customer’s pain points into account. As a result, we know exactly what we need to do to solve their challenges – today and in the future,” Omer explains. “delaware was the right choice as our partner in this exercise. They know how to combine the customer aspects with overarching IT and data knowledge. They brought all the pieces of the puzzles together, which was not an easy feat in our fast-moving context.