Tuesday June 28, 2016

Tjalling Smit, SVP Digital at Air France KLM

In his current position of Senior Vice President – Digital, Tjalling Smit oversees all customer facing digital activities of AIRFRANCE KLM: websites, apps, social media, etc. Smit is passionate about making AIRFRANCE and KLM “more human” and delivering excellent customer service by leveraging the ever increasing possibilities the Digital landscape provides. Smit joined KLM in 2001 as a Management Trainee and has held various positions in AIRFRANCE KLM since, all in the domains of Marketing and E-commerce.

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Hey, I'm Luka. I'm here at Savage Marketing Tech together with Charlien from KLM. So can you tell me a little bit about what you do in KLM? Yeah, sure. I'm what we call SVP digital, which means I oversee all our digital activities, the websites, our apps and our social media activities. Okay. So you're here today at this marketing conference and you've just come down from a panel. I heard some good stuff about a lot of some content strategies and things. Can you elaborate on what is content strategies in KLM nowadays? Well, we like to think that our product in itself is content. So we have created quite a few interesting videos where we show how our operation is run on a day to day basis. We actually filmed in the cockpit and we marketed those videos via YouTube and it was a huge success. People really liked seeing what an airline is. So what's your reflections on why that became such a huge success? I think it relates to the fact that flying for a lot of people still has some romance to it, if you will. It's still something that speaks to people. And it also shows that we are genuine as a brand and that we are people behind the brand. It's not just advertising or other boring stuff. It's really flying from A to B. And I think our audience really appreciated that. It's definitely something about this. I'm trusting my life in somebody else's hands, both plane wise, but also who flies my plane. So who are those guys, right? Exactly. And I think with these videos, we are able to show them who are the people behind the brand and who are the people that safely take our passengers from A to B. That's cool. I talked with another guy earlier today who was very focused on this. What is the story we tell about the company? And it also seems like that the story you tell is also the story that your employees tell. Yeah. Again, we like to think that it's important to show to our audiences and to our customers and potential customers who are the people behind the airline. And this is what we did with these videos. So now we're in almost midway through 2016. Half the budgets are burned, but you still have half a year left on your 2016 plan. What does that plan consist of for KLM? Well, we have a strategy that is evolving around being where the customer is. We have a wonderful website and a beautiful app that are here to stay. But we believe that increasingly people want to be served in the digital place where they live. And that can be any third party platform like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or WeChat or any of these other platforms. So we are really ensuring that all the services that we offer on our website, we also make available via those platforms. So we don't longer ask people to come to our website to do check-in. In the future, they will be able to do that via one of those platforms. Or we no longer send booking confirmations via email. We send them via Facebook Messenger or via WhatsApp. So you no longer have to leave the platform of your choice to interact with our brand.