Author Details:
- Name: Arnd Rychel
- Title: Community Infrastructure Engineer
- Company: Medion AG
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
- About me: I have been working at MEDION since 2000. Since 2014, I've been in charge of the MEDION Community as Community Manager.
- Company: MEDION, as one of the very few companies that boasts a comprehensive portfolio of classic entertainment electronics as well as information technology products, remains in a position to respond to the demands of a digital and networked CE market with its user-friendly product range in the Project Business segment. In addition to its traditional business involving special sales promotions of consumer electronics products in Europe, MEDION also markets a complementary line of services, particularly in the areas of telecommunications, photo services, downloads and other online services. MEDION is also continuing to strengthen its brand as a symbol of products and services offering high quality and best value for money as well as excellent design. MEDION has a good presence in Germany and the entire eurozone, as well as in Scandinavia and the UK, and with the support of its retail and cooperation partners maintains very well organized and professional sales and service units in these countries.
- Our team: Our ‘International Knowledge Management’ team collects internal and external knowledge and makes it available both within the company and to end customers. In addition to operating instructions and downloads of drivers, our work also includes service processes and the maintenance of product databases and FAQs.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
We select and distribute knowledge in order to reduce support requests and improve self-service, among other things.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
We have introduced the Community to generally relieve the entire After Sales process. The aim was to expand self-service.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
Among other things, the community FAQs are integrated via API on our service homepage.
We have optimised our FAQs in two main ways for this purpose.
- For product-specific FAQs, the name and material number are stored in the footer of the FAQ so that they can be displayed to the searching end customer in conjunction with our product database on our service homepage.
- On the other hand, IRIS codes are stored in the footer of general FAQs so that they can be used in conjunction with our online troubleshooter. Depending on the result, the customer can either help themselves and thus avoid sending in the device or start a repair service online, whereby all relevant data (including the IRIS codes) is transmitted to the repair service centre.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Self-service has enabled costs to be saved in the After Sales Support and repair departments. No specific key figures are available.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
The (API) integration on our service homepage significantly reduces support enquiries (call, email) and repair submissions. The integration of public and internal FAQs on the intranet provides call centre agents with extensive knowledge in a structured manner. Concrete key figures are not available.
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
The combination of customised modules at code level (html, css, variables) is what makes the complex workflow with external systems possible in the first place.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
We implement most of our customisation ourselves. However, if things get more complex or there is no OOTB solution, the teamwork with Khoros is very good and effective (example: customisation of SSO with the help of Nils Drews).