Communication directors of the future will focus on the customer experience

Mattias Rådström has been the new Senior Vice President of Communication, Marketing and Investor Relations at Cramo for two months. The fact that these three areas of operations are not traditionally combined under the same title was nothing Mattias had any hesitations about. On the contrary – this was a major contributing factor in him taking the job.

“It’s a broad role, and I think it’s really fun. Many companies have a challenge creating brand communication that is consistent with the company’s other communication, but by combining the responsibility for marketing, communication and IR, I believe we will be able to control the brand more effectively in all of Cramo’s channels.”

Mattias’s position is also new for Cramo – as is the decision to add him to the group management team, which Mattias thinks is an important signal.

“If you want to achieve success in a company, no matter what company, I think it’s critical to also have the brand perspective at the group management level. After all, it’s essentially a question of helping the rest of the company do good business – by enabling us to achieve our business objectives through effective communication – and then we need to work together to create as strong a customer experience as possible.”

The customer experience is in fact something Mattias comes back to, and he is convinced that this will be an increasingly critical component in a brand’s success going forward. He believes it is a matter of getting to the core of the customer’s needs and challenges and having a genuine desire to act on this.

“I think it’s only positive that we are now talking more about how customers experience the brand rather than what channels can be used – if you build your company based on the desire to create a strong customer journey, this is secondary. The challenge is instead to get the entire organisation to work both strategically and operationally based on an objective like that.”

According to Mattias, it’s a fact that digitalisation has changed the playing field for how companies and other organisations work with their brand today, although they differ in how far they’ve come in their digital transformation. For Cramo, all stakeholders today are digital, so a coherent digital strategy is crucial. However, it’s important to Mattias not to lose sight of things and consider digital solutions an end in itself.

“Digital channels create great opportunities, but I think it’s important not to be blinded by this. An understanding of the customer’s needs, curiosity about their challenges and a desire to try to solve their problems always have to come first. Then you can use digital tools to develop your offering based on this.”

Mattias is quick to respond when asked what he thinks Cramo can do to help improve the customer experience.

“Cramo has so many wonderful development opportunities both in solving our customers’ needs but also in new, a bit more unexplored areas. After all, we’re very much part of the new sharing economy, where you rent instead of buy, which generates significant social benefits. I also think we have fantastically exciting opportunities to help deal with challenges in society. In our module operations, within a short period of time we can build quality housing as well as preschools, schools or other buildings for social use. These operations meet the needs of our customers, but in the long run of course they also meet the needs of the people who get access to housing or other premises, such as students, children and preschool teachers.”