Company: Viessmann
Company background: We are one family and think in generations. Viessmann is a global family business. Shaped by the Viessmann family of entrepreneurs, we thrive off the multifaceted talents of our members. We have grown considerably since Johann Viessmann founded the company in 1917, and we are proud to have shared in that journey here in North America since 1978. Today, more than 13,000 employees worldwide belong to the Viessmann Group, working in co-creation and following their purpose: Creating living spaces for generations to come. Viessmann is one of the leading international solution providers for climatization, industrial and refrigeration systems. We have a strong international outlook, maintaining 22 production companies in 12 countries, subsidiaries and representatives in 74 countries, and 120 sales offices around the world. For four generations, Viessmann has been providing comfortable, efficient and environmentally responsible heating solutions, tailored to the needs of the market. With ongoing research and development and a focus on product innovation, Viessmann has pioneered technologies that have continuously set standards and made the company into a technological innovator and pacesetter of the entire industry: A climate solutions company.
Contact: Sven Becker
Title: Lead Social Media
Related URLs:
Kudos Category: Holistic Customer Engagement Platform
1. Tell us about your integration or unification strategy for connecting multiple CX teams and tools.
Viessmann is not your typical retail company. We do not sell running shoes or the like. HVAC is a necessity whereas power tools for example are not. Our unification strategy for integrating multiple CX teams and tools is rooted in the fact that we are always looking to put our customers first, especially when it comes to taking their feedback into consideration. Naturally, we quickly realized that the internet is a hotbed of discussion for our customers and seeing that the vast majority of them communicated on a number of specialized trade forums, we started to engage in dialog on these very platforms. Soon after, it was not only our customers who seeked our newly started digital support, but also an array of individuals, who merely owned or planned on acquiring one of our products. Realizing this quickly growing demand, we trained and formed a qualified social media dialog team to answer questions across forums, multiple communities, and throughout our social accounts. But, this was only the beginning! We needed a “home turf” so to speak. Thus our Viessmann Community was born.
After its creation, we soon saw effects, which from a marketing perspective, proved to be rather pleasant. No matter what industry one may look at, it is an ever so common occurrence that users tend to engage in dialog underneath a company’s social media advertisements and posts. While these comments may many times be positive, it is also not uncommon for users to seek service or voice experiences, which in their opinion were not always all that great. Yet, as our community kept growing we noticed that questionable - or from a marketing perspective - unfavorable comments vanished on our social media accounts nearly all together, as users gladly accepted our Viessmann Community as a place where they would receive fast digital service or as a place where they could read up on the questions they had and find solutions to their issues.
While these dialogs and conversations were managed manually in the beginning, it soon became apparent that a specialist software was indeed needed in order to manage their sheer volume. With this, we decided to deploy Khoros Care, which also carried along the possibility of allowing us to route customer conversations to our appropriate teams in a fast and end-to-end manner.
The belief in a well-thought-through customer centric approach, along with a seamless and silo-breaking work philosophy is what distinguishes us at Viessmann. This is exactly what we had in mind, when we decided to also implement Khoros Marketing, allowing us to connect the major dots between our Customer Dialog, Social Media and several other teams involved in outbound communications or services. Completing the circle, Khoros Marketing now allowed the service oriented teams to plan for phases with high dialog activity, as they now had an one-click-insight into all planned outbound communication activities, while communication focused teams were henceforth able to gain insights in immediate reactions of their targeted audiences via Khoros Care. Furthermore, we were since able to direct users in need of support directly to the Community and track their path along their digital journey.
2. What specific impact(s) has a more holistic engagement platform had on your customer and/or employee experiences?
A holistic engagement platform approach has impacted our customer and employee experience in a number of ways. Using Khoros Care, we have been able to link users on social channels to Salesforce accounts, which has enabled our Care agents to handle the influx of questions agiley by passing them off to the Social Marketing team. In the past, we were bound by only being able to send screenshots back and forth. Having everything consolidated in a single platform environment has made this experience much smoother and ensured the privacy of the ensuing conversation, which in the past allowed anyone visibility.
On a larger scale, we have completed two major projects that are emblematic of improved customer and employee experience – Community Redesign & SSO.
1) Community Redesign
Offering our users a unique service experience at any given touch point is of paramount importance to us. As more and more topics filled the community and numbers of individual threads grew in an access of hundreds of thousand, we found it was necessary to create a better and even more user-friendly environment. While tediously reorganizing literally hundreds of thousands of treats, we also updated the entire registration and login process, automatically assigning users specific roles upon registration, which now lead them comfortably into their designated areas.
Using CRM/SSO to validate these users our redesigned home page and SSO work helped create two distinct and positive experiences for each customer type.
2) SSO
By integrating SSO and CRM with Salesforce we enabled our customers to login with their current credentials. This gave our agents the ability to discern which customer they were working with rather than having to piece together this knowledge from information, which they have provided in e.g. their comments. Khoros Care also allowed us to allocate comments or posts, regardless of their network of origin, to agents specialized in e.g. a certain product classification. Since we noticed that roughly 90% of conversations were technical in nature this was extremely beneficial. However, with the remaining 10% of non-technical conversations, we needed to find a solution that enabled us to route these comments to our Social teams. Khoros Care was able to address this desire and ultimately is what led us to its use.
In conclusion, the holistic implementation of Khoros Community, Care and Marketing, as an interwoven construct of cross-departmental and seamless customer service approach, has enabled to pursuit one of our most fundamental philosophies - providing our partners and the users of our products alike, with a truly unique end-to-end service experience, along-side all of our social service touch points, while seamlessly connecting our department with an integrated, single-provider solution.
3. What specific business outcomes and successes have you measured resulting from those improved employee and/or customer experiences? Please use metrics if possible.
At Viessmann, our products are often installed as a single component in a holistic, infrastructural HVAC system. Each of these systems is carefully planned out by specialist engineers. The way our products are implemented and combined with other system components makes every system unique. This is why we have to refrain from merely providing a TKB, but have to focus on specific questions in forums instead, because each installation could be completely different. Our Agents often need to carefully check service numbers, components which were ordered along with the main product in order to be able to piece together the system the user has a question about, in their minds. Combining sales, service and historical dialog data, provided by the community, allows them to provide spot-on service for each individual case.
Since May 2021, other pertinent metrics related to Community, Care, and Marketing are listed below:
Community
- 8% Growth in posts
- 9% Growth in Page views
- Benchmarking:
- 78% in total visit and Organic Growth
- 118% growth in First Replies/Topics
- 41% Growth in Registration
Care
- 31% improvement in Avg TAR
- 34% increase incoming posts
Marketing
- Increased efficiencies by ensuring 70% of content scheduled was schedule in advance
- Breaking down internal silos led to even more effective content as engagement increased across social channels.
But we noticed the number of people visiting actually grew; however, the number of repetitive questions asked went down significantly. As of now, we have over 46k registered users. What’s more, the amount of backlinks created has also generated more website visits.
Overall, our corporate philosophies of thinking ahead, pushing forward on digitalization, centering our partners and end-users of our products as our primary good, along with our partnership with Khoros made a huge difference in the success of our Holistic Customer Engagement.