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Customer Story

Leading E-commerce Platform Scores Big with Data-Driven Training Initiatives

Bol.com achieves market gains with a customized AI and data-focused training curriculum offering its employees a technical edge
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Related services
Data Technology

Industry
Retail

Company
Xebia

Bol.com is an e-commerce company located in the Netherlands. It was officially founded as Bertelsmann Online in 1999 as part of Bertelsman, a German multinational and one of the largest media conglomerates worldwide. Its main products include general merchandising such as jewelry, electronics, home goods, toys, books, and gardening. In 2011, “Selling via bol.com” was introduced allowing retailers to sell on their platform, garnering upwards of 30,000 retailers. It currently has 11 million customers across the Netherlands and Belgium with approximately 2,000 employees. 
Why
Use and enrich the data-driven approaches to become a market leader
What
Onboarding and training employees to harness data and improve performance
How
Create and keep up to date in-company training programs

Better Data Gets the Edge

Bol.com uses data to guide customer experience and meet increasing market demands. With its active data-driven and AI-rich platform, bol.com has quickly become a forerunner in this ever-evolving field. Maintaining this standard means having a strong data science community. As advanced analyst Melissa Perotti noted: “Decision-making at bol.com is based on data first. The data doesn’t confirm someone’s hunch; it tells us where to go.” Keeping up with technology required bol.com to implement new strategies in the way they worked. They approached Xebia because they needed to keep their employees informed and knowledgeable.

Build a Knowledge Base

Raising data maturity and learning how to use data in a meaningful way is necessary in today’s data-driven world. Keeping your employees on the cutting edge of using data, machine learning, and AI means a more productive, more knowledgeable, and capable workforce. But this requires organization and expertise to implement change as well as make training more meaningful. Bol.com chose Xebia to achieve exactly this for their employees. “Xebia understood how we saw our data science capability, and where we wanted to go,” explains a bol.com data analyst. “It was also really flexible in setting up the programs, so the courses were perfectly tailored to our situation, and the material was very applicable in our work.”

“It was a challenge to ensure the applicability of a course where employees with different backgrounds come together. That learning process is still ongoing and we feel we’re getting better at it with every step we take”
Bol.com
Melissa Perotti Advanced Analyst, bol.com

Driving Successful Learning Habits

“Xebia’s training was customizable to our needs,” said Perotti, “So now our employees can stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, models, and developments in the AI and data landscape.” Bol.com also developed an “a la carte” menu so their employees could choose what training curriculum best suited them. The insight provided in these tailored training sessions resulted in higher productivity, better organization, and collaboration. Running data initiatives became something both technical and non-technical cohorts could accomplish together. Xebia continues to be part of bol.com’s data journey, offering courses that combine both theory and practice to great, results-oriented effect.

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