Meet Silvia
"We'll soon have even more opportunities to increase customer engagement"
Silvia Appelman, CRM leadHi! Could you introduce yourself?
I'm Silvia Appelman, I'm 31 years old and I live in Wervershoof. It's a great location because I've only got a 10-minute commute by bike to reach Action's head office in Zwaagdijk. I've worked at Action for five years now. I started as an email marketer and I now head up the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team.
What is it you do as CRM Lead?
As a lead, I give the CRM team direction. The team now has four colleagues and we look at how we can increase customer interaction through newsletters, the app, the website, push notifications and more. More than six million customers across Europe receive our newsletter every week. As we're adding more and more countries all the time, you get to know different cultures. One example is that sports products tend to come across better in newsletters in France than in the Netherlands. I think it's interesting to see this sort of thing in data and click behaviour and take any appropriate action. We're also working hard on implementing a new marketing automation programme. This will soon give our team even more opportunities to increase interaction by sending relevant messages through the right channels at the right time. So, that's great!
Has anything surprised you at Action?
The fact that Action is a fast-growing, international non-food retailer appealed to me right from the start. I heard that you could grow quickly here, but quite that fast? That surprised me. It's great to feel that your manager encourages you to grow and gives you the space to develop. And if you have a good idea, you also have the freedom to get the ball rolling.
"Developing the customer journey gives me a real buzz"
What's the best part of your job? And what can be challenging?
Developing the customer journey gives me a real buzz. I also enjoy working with data. Since not all the departments at Action are as data-driven as us, increasing awareness in the organisation is a huge challenge. We're going through a development phase at the moment. As an example, we've recently been taking an agile approach to our work, which brings its own challenges in the start-up phase. In the future, however, it offers us many different skillsets within our team. The integrated approach in multidisciplinary teams works well to achieve the best results in double-quick time.
What are you proud of at work?
I'm proud of my personal growth and the department's development. I think it's increased fivefold, or even tenfold in recent years.
What's the atmosphere like?
The atmosphere is very good and I've been pleasantly surprised. For some reason, I expected the atmosphere to be a little colder when I first started working at Action. We work hard, but there's also time for having fun, and you're never alone. We regularly do fun things together as a team, and we're going to play padel tennis again soon!
Do you have any tips for future colleagues?
Just go for it! If you live near Zwaagdijk, it's a great opportunity to work for a large international retailer. There are so many opportunities to grow here. If you live a little further afield, there's also a shuttle service to our office every day from Hoorn station.