DPG Media is the largest media company in both the Netherlands and the Flemish region of Belgium. The organisation produces text, photo, sound and video content for various channels such as paper newspapers (such as Volkskrant and AD) and magazines, websites, mobile apps (for tablets and smartphones). In addition to news brands, DPG Media also has a radio brand and 10 digital only brands, and in Belgium there’s a big focus on radio, television and entertainment.
When it was first established, DPG Media solely produced paper newspapers. However the market has since taken a turn. Customers’ needs are evolving and digital products have become a primary medium for consuming news. This is especially true among younger generations that want everything digital. Meanwhile, the combination of traditional and digital news is still very popular among customers. For example, while many readers consume their news digitally throughout the week, they still prefer reading a paper newspaper over the weekend.
So how does DPG Media plan to better cater to the customers interested in their digital products? Let’s take a look.
DPG introduces a new digital platform
We sat down with Emma Haagen, UX Research & Product Analyst at DPG Media to gain some more insight into DPG Media’s digital strategy and why this organisation chose to start utilising customer feedback to fuel this strategy. Here’s what she had to say…
‘DPG Media recently switched over to a new digital platform. This was a large undertaking as it required us to switch all of our news brands over as well. Now that everything is finally up and running, we have time to start acting on the feedback again. What’s more, if we want to make improvements to our new digital platform based on their input, it’s easier to do so across all of our brands! We want to learn more about the issues our readers are encountering and what they need to get the most out of our products.’
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What is their digital strategy?
The online customer journey at DPG Media starts with Discovery and Allure.
“People need to know that we exist, what they can get out of our news channels and of course, be tempted to come back to us and ultimately sign up for a subscription.”
These stages are followed by the Use stage.
“We have found that people often visit the website or mobile app several times a day to check the latest news. So here we measure the number of articles and videos that are being viewed.
In Belgium, for example, games such as crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles have just been introduced as an additional service. This is something we plan on evaluating very soon.”
And then we have the Exit stage, which unfortunately follows on occasion.
“This is the stage when customers cancel their subscription or switch to another service. This behaviour is something DPG Media wants to dig into and understand a bit better. Why are our customers cancelling? Where are they going? Thankfully deploying customer feedback in this stage serves as a great way to gain insight into this behaviour.”
The Solution
The organisation previously used tools such as Typeform and Instabug, which – according to the team – later proved to be ‘inefficient in practice’.
Using different tools created a bit of chaos as there were multiple dashboards and overviews.
As a result, they started looking for a more advanced solution. Their requirements? A customer feedback solution that could be used for both mobile apps and websites, which was also capable of showing all feedback results in one, single overview.
Active and Passive Feedback
DPG Media collects feedback using both passive and active feedback forms. The passive feedback forms are found in a permanent location on both the website and mobile app. Here users can leave feedback by awarding a number of stars and indicating what he/she does or does not like.
“This feedback is really important, especially after the release of the new platform. In fact, when we first launched the new platform, our feedback forms were much more prominent, so that we could get a good idea of what our users thought about the changes. After a while, we eventually moved the feedback buttons to the menu.”
In addition to passive feedback, DPG Media also employs active feedback forms, or feedback forms that are triggered by specific customer behaviour.
The Result
Thanks to the presence of feedback buttons, DPG Media regularly receives feature requests. The insights from the customer feedback are applied when organising the backlog.
For example, you can see a PDF version of the newspaper in the tablet app. With Mopinion we have investigated what users encounter when they use the PDF viewer. Once feedback started trickling in about this, we immediately started leveraging this input to optimise the PDF viewer.
Our collaboration with Mopinion started small, with just four news brands. We were so satisfied with the result that we have since expanded. Now all of our news brands use Mopinion software
Emma Haagen, UX Researcher & Product Analyst at DPG Media
DPG tells us they’ve also been able to share their feedback across different layers within the organisation.
“Some departments, such as the development department were – figuratively speaking – very far away from the reader. They are not directly in contact with one another. And this is why we’ve introduced the weekly ‘user moment’. We pick a news brand and discuss the feedback with the Product Owner, Development and Digital Chief. In this way, we are able to keep different departments abreast of the latest feedback from customers.”
Thanks to customer feedback, DPG Media can effectively stay abreast of customer needs.
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