On the beautiful date of 09-09-’09 a new initiative was started that I myself am very excited about. In recent years I have seen that it is very slowly becoming the truth that the Internet is the medium from which you can really measure everything, unlike other channels such as television, print or radio.

Measuring this is not so much about having visits or conversions, it only gets interesting when you get insights from your web data. Where are things not going well (enough) and can I serve my customers better, or, more from the company's point of view, how can I ensure that I meet my targets. More and more people are steering for this (hooray!), but the execution of the improvement is still sometimes lacking.

Based on usability and persuasion techniques, graphic design, interaction design and content modifications are used to try to increase conversion. However, there is a common thread missing here. I believe that you need to work and get to know your customer better and better and how he reacts to certain content and interaction that you offer based on a hypothesis. By continuously testing your customers, you can build knowledge for an organization about the behavior that customers have when they are in a certain context and how you can best respond to this: behavioral personas.

And that is exactly what Online Dialogue will do: setting up an organization for clients in which the customer dialogue is central and in which knowledge is built up on how to communicate optimally with customers in certain situations. Not only for web, no for all channels in which 1 on 1 communication is possible, such as email, mobile, telephone, chat and DM.

This makes it extra challenging. On the one hand building up all relevant information that can influence customer behavior within the dialogue such as psychological characteristics, influence from social networks and competitive movements, but on the other hand optimizing across channels. After all, the customer also switches up and down.

In the coming months, we are going to build a team of specialists in strategy, analytics, behavior, interaction and content who can collectively take up the challenge and actually drive all the functional requirements for the different channels and guide the development. Time for clients, colleagues and partners. Schedule your calendar full, I'm looking forward to it!