Hörmann: Enabling soaring customer satisfaction with ultra-convenient cloud services
Explore Hörmann’s journey with SAP
Delivering a consistent customer experience is always a challenge – and even more so when you have a global sales network spanning 90 countries. Using SAP Customer Experience solutions connected to ERP, Hörmann KG Verkaufsgesellschaft is digitalizing and streamlining sales and service operations to ensure a consistently excellent customer experience around the world.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Building Products | Steinhagen, Germany | 6,000 employees |
Less time spent on complaint tickets within one year
Of complaint tickets submitted via Hörmann ServicePortal or Hörmann Direct Connect
Issue resolution
Head of Department, Central Customer and Service Applications, Hörmann KG Verkaufsgesellschaft
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Building Products | Steinhagen, Germany | 6,000 employees |
Less time spent on complaint tickets within one year
Of complaint tickets submitted via Hörmann ServicePortal or Hörmann Direct Connect
Issue resolution
Head of Department, Central Customer and Service Applications, Hörmann KG Verkaufsgesellschaft
Connecting customer interactions across touchpoints
Family-owned Hörmann Group is one of the world’s largest suppliers of doors. More than 6,000 employees in 40 specialized factories in Europe, North America, and Asia develop and produce high-quality doors, frames, and operators, as well as perimeter protection and storage space systems for use in private and commercial properties. Hörmann has sold over 20 million doors worldwide since 1935, and today its annual turnover is over €1 billion.
Headquartered in Germany, Hörmann has more than 100 sales locations in 40 countries and is represented by sales partners in 50 countries. In the past, customer relationship management differed between countries and between branches – there was no central customer database. “Account information was stored in spreadsheets, on paper, or simply in the sales rep’s head,” says Lennard Eichler, Head of Department, Central Customer and Service Applications at Hörmann. “This made it difficult to deliver a consistent customer experience.”
To make it easier to do business with Hörmann, the company is working to bring together its global sales, repair and maintenance service, and marketing activities.
“Our ultimate goal is to deliver an exceptional experience for both reseller partners and end customers,” says Eichler. “To do this, we wanted to create a single online portal for support, product information, complaint management – everything that reseller partners could need, all in one place.”
Integrating customer experience solutions on a unified digital platform
To deliver a smooth customer experience, Hörmann replaced disparate manual processes with a unified digital platform for sales and service: SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, part of SAP Customer Experience solutions.
Integrated with Hörmann’s ERP system via SAP Integration Suite, part of SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Sales Cloud provides a central customer data source, delivering a 360-degree view of every customer interaction. Hörmann uses SAP Service Cloud to support ticketing and complaint management across the business, backed by AI-driven insights, recommendations, and automation. The company also deployed SAP Marketing Cloud for its B2B marketing team, helping them to deliver more personalized omnichannel interactions based on real-time customer data. SAP Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) provides an identity provider for login and permissions.
Hörmann enables all employees with direct access to its SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud system. Reseller partners, meanwhile, can log in to various online portals developed by Hörmann to view account details, sales statistics, and revenue figures and to submit and track the progress of support tickets. With the delegated admin console, reseller partners can manage the user rights of their employees by themselves, ensuring that only people with the right permissions can access the Hörmann online portal solutions.
Reseller partners can also take advantage of the Hörmann Direct Connect service to connect their ERP system directly to SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud for faster, easier data exchange via SAP Integration Suite, part of SAP Business Technology Platform. “This means that the dealer doesn’t need to copy and paste information from their ERP system into our portals but, for example, simply click a button in their own system to submit a support ticket to us,” explains Eichler. “There is direct system-to-system communication, authenticated via SSL client certificate on SAP Cloud Platform Integration.”
Reseller partners can start the complaint process via either Hörmann ServicePortal or Hörmann Direct Connect, creating a ticket in SAP Service Cloud. The Hörmann sales agent can then check the ticket details and decide on the next step. For example, if a replacement is needed then the ticket is forwarded to the factory. Reseller partners can track the status of their ticket at any time, and can interact with Hörmann for more details.
Tickets are standardized, containing the same fields and categories regardless of customer location. Hörmann sales agents and factory employees have access to and can discuss complaint tickets with complete transparency.
Head of Department, Central Customer and Service Applications, Hörmann KG Verkaufsgesellschaft
Empowering employees to deliver the very best customer service
With the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, Hörmann employees have full visibility of customer and ticket history. The result? Better-informed salespeople and service technicians can deliver a superior customer experience.
“Sales staff and service technicians are now on the same page, and working with the same data,” confirms Eichler. “All employees use the same system, so everyone knows where to click to find the relevant data. This enables us to provide a consistent response to customers and resolve issues faster, helping us meet our service level agreements and improve customer satisfaction.”
While many of Hörmann’s reseller partners still prefer to speak on the phone, demand for digital solutions is growing fast. With SAP Customer Experience solutions connected to SAP ERP via the SAP Business Technology Platform, Hörmann can deliver an end-to-end digital customer journey while ensuring seamless integration with existing channels.
“Particularly since the pandemic, we’ve seen increased demand for digital services from our partner network,” says Eichler. “SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud combined with Hörmann’s online portals give users 24x7x365 access to everything they need in just a few clicks. This is great news for our dealers who are open at the weekend, since they no longer need to wait until Monday morning to request information from their sales rep. Users can log in anytime.”
Head of Department, Central Customer and Service Applications, Hörmann KG Verkaufsgesellschaft
Going further on the digital transformation journey
Hörmann plans to add SAP Field Service Management to the mix. This will enable the company to automatically plan field service calls and to see the status of every call in real time, further accelerating issue resolution.
The company is also exploring how it can use artificial intelligence (AI) to support intelligent ticketing capabilities and predictive maintenance.
Looking further ahead, Hörmann will continue its digital transformation journey by implementing SAP S/4HANA as the global standard ERP system to help the company manage it business even more efficiently.
With SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Technology Platform, and SAP Customer Experience solutions all running in the cloud, Hörmann will benefit from lower costs while maintaining openness for future flexibility.