Plieger optimizes and personalizes customer experience with SAP cloud solutions
SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Cloud for Customer, and SAP Marketing Cloud provide a 360-degree customer view at Plieger
Offering not only a pleasant, but also a personalized customer experience. This is not as obvious if you serve a very diverse business target group. Nevertheless, Plieger Groep, a specialist in sanitary and heating, has taken important steps in that direction with SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Cloud for Customer. SAP specialist Acorel guides them in this digital transformation.
The Plieger Group consists of Plieger, ThermoNoord and Memodo. With 60 B2B branches and 20 showrooms for consumers, it is active throughout the Netherlands in the field of sanitary, heating, installation, air and ventilation, electric kitchens, solar panels and energy storage. Customers are mainly installation companies, but also project developers. In addition, Plieger is best known among consumers for its own Plieger brand, which is the third largest sanitary brand in the Netherlands.
With this wide range of sales channels, the company wants to tailor the customer experience as closely as possible to the individual customer. That required a major overhaul of the way customers interacted with the brand. At the beginning of this year, the Plieger Group started this transformation with a brand new webshop based on SAP Commerce Cloud and an ordering app. “The webshop makes ordering faster and easier. And we continuously improve in 3-weekly sprints. Ultimately, this webshop should develop into a platform that can be used throughout the customer journey, for ordering, self-service, administration and perhaps also paying in our branches,” says Ids van Oversteeg, Director Finance & IT at the Plieger Group.
One place for all customer data
The arrival of the new webshop and app marked the beginning of a digital transformation. One that was recently followed up with the arrival of SAP Cloud for Customer. A welcome addition, but also an important basis for optimizing the customer experience. “We now have an environment in which all customer information will come together, instead of being hidden in e-mail, calendars and a billing system, for example. As a result, our account managers know much better what is going on with the customer. Moreover, this knowledge is no longer in the minds of a few, but we share it company-wide.”
In addition, Cloud for Customer provides practical applications. Plieger Groep records all interactions regarding, for example, service requests and customer visits. Plieger also uses Cloud for Customer for prospect management. “We now have much better insight into which customers have submitted which service questions,” notes Van Oversteeg. “We didn’t have that link with our previous ticketing system.”
In addition to Cloud for Customer, SAP Marketing Cloud, Google Analytics and Google Cloud were also added to the application landscape. With these solutions, the Plieger Group can better tailor its marketing activities to the customer on the basis of customer preferences and behaviour. “We have defined a number of personas based on data. Based on these personas, we approach customers directly if this is relevant to them: for example offers in the product category in which they usually order, alternative products and associated products.”
360-degree view on the customer
The choice of SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Cloud for Customer to complement SAP Commerce Cloud was no surprise. The solutions can be closely integrated and use a shared database. This creates a ‘single source of truth’, and all customer interactions on these platforms provide a 360-degree customer view. It is precisely this overall picture that is important to the Plieger Group. Based on that view, it can optimize the entire customer journey and better tailor it to individual needs.
Future-proof
The three SAP solutions provide a solid foundation for future developments. First of all, to further refine, automate and personalize the customer experience. But also for further optimization of internal processes. “We are currently looking at how we can simplify the onboarding of new customers with automation in Cloud for Customer. Approaching customers on the basis of behavior and preferences will also soon have to be done automatically on a large scale,” says Van Oversteeg.
Trust
Acorel has been the SAP implementation partner since the beginning of the digital transformation, while the other partner DEPT takes care for the concept, design and app. “It is pleasant to work with Acorel,” notes Van Oversteeg. “Good knowledge of SAP technology, a real advisory partner and always thinking in terms of solutions.”
Acorel and the Plieger Group opted for an agile-based approach in which solutions and functionality were rolled out in phases. According to Joost Goudriaan, Account Manager at Acorel, this approach was an important condition for success. “We first build a foundation, put it live and started improving the foundation from there. That works much better with such a large-scale implementation than if you blueprint everything in advance, develop it and then find out that the solution does not quite meet all expectations during the implementation.”
The implementation did not go smoothly all the time, such a large-scale process always has challenges. However, that did not harm the great cooperation. On the contrary, Goudriaan notes: “It is an advantage that we have known each other for a long time. We can be open and transparent when it comes to expectations, and we trust that we will find solutions together when problems arise. We always fix it together.”
This news item originates from SAP. You can read our customer story with Plieger here!
