A sound investment: Robeco improves the online experience with customer feedback

Robeco is an international asset manager that was founded in 1929 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands as the Rotterdamsch Beleggings Consortium (Rotterdam Investment Consortium). In fact, it was one of the first to offer investment opportunities to consumers. Over the years, Robeco has evolved from a traditional asset manager to an omnichannel service provider. Nowadays, everyone can invest online at Robeco Retail, benefiting from the advantages of a large institutional investor, tailor-made for consumers. Robeco offers a wide range of online services for the older and the younger segments. From the ready-made, all-in-one solutions such as Robeco ONE to an extensive service package to manage your own portfolio.

In this customer story, Sanne IJben, Customer Experience Manager at Robeco tells the story of Robeco’s transformation and how Mopinion has helped her organisation reach its online goals…


Source: Robeco

We proudly base all our investment decisions on figures and smart models, therefore reducing risks and achieving optimal results. After all, we are a means for our clients to realise their (often emotionally charged) goals in life. Constantly trying to find new ways to make investing more accessible and understandable for our customers.

Sanne IJben, CX Manager at Robeco

The Robeco Website

About six years ago Robeco Retail switched to 100% online service. The credit crisis demanded a change, the Dutch public said farewell to investment products en masse. Additionally, all sorts of new providers entered the market at a rapid pace, offering simple and transparent products using online platforms. It was then that Robeco realised that its ‘I know what’s right for you’ service approach was no longer viable.

There was an urgent need for change. It was a true ‘adapt or die’ scenario.

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Traditionally, Robeco’s customer base consisted mainly of consumers aged 45 to 75 years, employed, with financial advisers. Switching to a 100% online service and an execution-only strategy opened the market to a younger target audience. This generation expects everything to be readily available online and prefer to have control over everything.


Source: Pexels

“We want to make investing accessible and understandable to everyone. Not only can you start with a small sum and gain access to specific markets, but we also offer information and tools to make responsible investment decisions. Educating our customers to understand their risks and opportunities to reach their goals. Of course in an easy way (seamless experience). Therefore, we are focusing on providing self-service and online assistance when and where our customers need it.”

The Challenge

“Nowadays, we are talking to fewer and fewer customers. Not to mention, a considerable part of customer loyalty taking place on an emotional level.”

Robeco has been using customer surveys for years to monitor their customer satisfaction. With the transition to a fully digital service, tools to measure customer behavior online became even more important. By monitoring online behavior you mainly measure WHAT customers do. But customer feedback gives them insights into the WHY. They not only want to know that customers drop out at a certain touchpoint, but especially why. Maybe, something is unclear, inconvenient, or is there a functional problem?

Thanks to feedback we are building a better relationship with our customers; we have an understanding of their emotional drivers. This is necessary to provide them with the right information and tools. We want to give the right support.

For Robeco, customer feedback was needed at various steps in the customer journey. Before switching to Mopinion, they were using two different tools. One tool was used for the website and general customer surveys and another tool for feedback regarding communications via email. Not only was there a lack of overview and thus the possibility to set priorities, but also an inability to respond quickly to feedback…

“Customer feedback ensures that we have the right insights to improve the online experience. Customer feedback is an important means (perhaps even the most important means) for meeting the needs of our customers and improving our online services.”

The Solution

Robeco has been using Mopinion for over half a year now…

The main reasons for choosing Mopinion were the customisable dashboards and the action management capabilities. It is very easy to visualise the feedback results, allowing trends or outliers to be detected quickly. From here, further research can be done. And because all feedback is collected and processed in one tool, it has made closing the feedback loop much easier.

IJben continues, “Although the majority of our customers do not contact the Investment Service department and are only active online, our employees still play a crucial role in improving our online experience. We compare the feedback results with the contact moments of customers to see where adjustments are needed.

Important customer experience metrics (such as the CSAT, GCR and CES) visualised in the dashboards ensure that their teams can keep a close eye on the customer experience. Every month, these results are fed back to the various teams (Investment Services, IT and Marketing) and deeper analyses are carried out to explain trends or to determine the need for further investigation. Based on the results, sessions with a multidisciplinary team are then organised to deal with an issue.

Feedback forms and triggers

Throughout the website, Robeco’s customers can leave feedback through the feedback button. The Robeco team also actively requests feedback across various touchpoints on the website (e.g. after making a transaction), in emails and customer surveys.

“We use many types of questions in the forms, depending on where a customer is at in the journey. Did she reach her goal (GCR), how much effort did it take (CES) or how does the customer feel about our service in general. The trigger for these feedback forms varies from behaviour on the website (for example, when leaving a page or after a fund purchase) to an annual invitation for general feedback on our services.”


Screenshot: Feedback form measuring Goal Completion Rate (GCR) and Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Results

“Mopinion gives us clear and real-time insights into our customers’ feedback and enables us to close the feedback loop. We see the development of customer satisfaction at a glance, as well as where we immediately need to follow up on feedback – either by calling the customer back or by adjusting the online journey in some way.

The main advantage of Mopinion is that all feedback is integrated into one platform and we can quickly gain initial insights via the dashboard by comparing CX metrics such as CSAT, GCR and CES. It immediately becomes clear where things are going well and what can be improved.

In short, Mopinion has provided us with insights that enable us to further develop our self-service strategy on the website. It helps us to listen to the voice of our customers and make it actionable.”

Interesting findings and results…

“I am still amazed by the amount of feedback our customers are willing to give us! In the past, I had invest a lot of time in analysing the data to be able to discover certain trends or striking insights. Now we have a clear vision on what is going on with our customers.

We can now quickly see what impact new implementations on our website have on customer satisfaction. These insights help us realizse quick wins and prioritise our backlog to improve our online service.”


Pictured: Sanne IJben, CX Manager at Robeco

Mopinion’s software enables Robeco to act much faster on dropouts in online journeys. The feedback results provide input for improving Robeco’s processes and preventing service outages in the future.

“Thanks to Mopinion, we have put the various journeys into perspective which enables us to proactively make improvements when a journey scores below average. We increased conversions and cross-sales and are able to better understand why our visitors act the way they do. In the long run, we believe the Mopinion software will continue to help contribute to an improved online customer experience, helping even more people start investing at Robeco.”