Samenvatting

HelloFresh Nederland is a Dutch organisation which offers an e-commerce subscription service, providing a home-delivered box full of ingredients and recipes to use these ingredients to cook a healthy meal. The Dutch online food business is on the rise and HelloFresh Nederland is striving to master the Dutch food industry by maintaining its position as market leader. Just as any other organisation, HelloFresh Nederland is being challenged by a fast changing society and its ever-changing wants and needs. The company aims to satisfy each customer in each aspect of the provided service. It is commonly held that communication has a positive contribution to the overall experience and satisfaction of customers. They need to, amongst other factors, feel in line with the organizations’ messages, vision and philosophy. Moreover, the environment in which the customer is placed has been changed tremendously over the years. Some of the most important turning points in society have been marked by technological and digital innovations that increased the ability to save, transfer and communicate knowledge and information. This study explores the possibilities of how to improve the corporate communication with the customers of HelloFresh Nederland. The organization is currently unaware about the opinions and experiences of the customers about the communication between HelloFresh Nederland and the customer. The objective is to research the current way of communication, to gain in-depth knowledge about the customer’s experience and to get insights on how to utilize the communication tools of HelloFresh Nederland in an optimal way to satisfy the customers. By researching the current communication experiences of the customers and then finding out what the customer wants, regarding media channels, frequency and content, helps to reach the aim of creating a more satisfied customer experience. Moreover, by informing customers in the best suitable way, the Customer Service team of HelloFresh Nederland will need to spend less time communicating with the current customers. After careful elaboration on communication theories such as the Uses and Gratification theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, the Reinforcement theory and the Model of Determinants of Relationship Commitment, field research has been carried out. These theories helped to place the findings into context and to draw certain conclusions. Within this study, various research results -based upon both qualitative and quantitative research- are presented. Results showed how most customers experience the current communication from HelloFresh Nederland positively. Notwithstanding that this study reveals several modest points of improvement. The discussion of data has led to a thorough designed professional advice which includes the following: - Improvement of the use of different media channels, such as the business Blog and Social Media. By this the customers of HelloFresh Nederland will be more involved and feel part of a community. - Personalisation of the frequency in which customers receive information of the company so that customers will not experience any negative thoughts and feelings when being provided with information. - The content of the messages should be even more focused around keywords such as relevance and convenience. - More product information is clearly desirable. A part of the customers indicated that they were missing background information such as the origin and organic state of the products in the HelloFresh Box. - Staying focused on the changing wants and needs of the customer and keep up the good work of reflecting the vision throughout all communication.