As a freelancer I am basically my products and services. Therefore you might want to know a bit more about what makes me tick (see photos) - and of course my background and experience.

 

Timeline

• 2004: Mastered in Communication Science, University of Amsterdam

• 2006: Mastered in Political Science, University of Amsterdam

• 2006: Started my career as a consultant at TNS (now Kantar), where I learned how to do qualitative research, manage all kinds of stakeholders and facilitate workshops

• 2010: Made a small side-step to startup Growing Minds in online campaigning, but I missed the research part   

• 2012: Moved to MARE, an Amsterdam based qualitative research agency, where I managed a variety of research projects from start to finish in all kinds of sectors and clients. Also started with giving trainings and workshops in Design Thinking tools, like customer journey mapping 

• 2016: Became Head of Research at TravelBird, to make the company more customer-centric and grow a qualitative research team. Created a foundation for TravelBird's brand positioning and portfolio with an international needs segmentation. Facilitated multiple teams to integrate consumer insights into their strategy in a lean way: by setting up structural user testing, facilitating strategic workshops and trainings to empower them with skills like research basics, customer journey mapping, idea generation

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When I moved from agencies to client side myself, I realised business context can be complex and decision making is not mainly based on insights from research. With TravelBird being an online tech company, we had access to a lot of data and people. I felt the urge to gain insights ourselves and embed this into strategy in a fast and lean way, rather than being dependent on advise from research agencies. Besides offline methods like interviewing and user testing, we experimented a lot with online qualitative research tools. I learned that customer centricity grew alongside employees being involved in research or working with customer centric tools themselves.

 

Therefore I believe in 'do it yourself' customer centricity in organizations and in learning by doing. My goal is to increase customer centricity of companies by facilitating and training people within a business with customer centric skills and tools. My strength lies in the combination of a thorough qualitative research background,  broad experience with clients, cultures and topics from agency side and the actionable mindset to integrate research and insights in a fast-paced business environment from client side.