Vileda: Enhancing customer experiences with data-driven sales and service processes
Explore Vileda’s journey with SAP
Rare is the house without a famous Vileda product in its cleaning armor. For more than 70 years, millions of homes worldwide have sparkled because of Vileda’s innovative products. The company wanted to shine in its sales and service activities to optimize customer experiences. It employed the SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud solutions with this goal in mind.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Weinheim, Germany | 3,500 employees | valantic CX |
improvement in the sales forecast deviation in some countries.
Global IT Manager CRM Processes, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH, parent company of Vileda
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Weinheim, Germany | 3,500 employees | valantic CX |
improvement in the sales forecast deviation in some countries.
Global IT Manager CRM Processes, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH, parent company of Vileda
Seeking dynamic data and analytical capabilities
For decades, Vileda has been making the task of cleaning in homes, businesses, public facilities, and other premises as easy and efficient as possible with innovative products. It wished to better position these products so they’d be more easily recognized and found by customers throughout the world.
Vileda Professional is where the company develops and manufactures leading-edge cleaning solutions for professional users in various application areas, such as healthcare, controlled environments, general building cleaning, and hotels, restaurants, and cafés. Within this business-to-business division, the company’s field sales representatives were unable to produce reports or analyze sales activities with the existing database. And on the direct-to-consumer side of the business, one of the challenges was being able to identify a problem with a product at an early stage in the absence of analytical tools.
The company wanted to give both business areas a tool to track customer data and projects and to analyze information from all available sources, including from the SAP ERP application, to help make informed business decisions. Vileda therefore sought a customer relationship management system that could be integrated with a standardized ERP landscape and would streamline its sales and service processes.
Global IT Manager CRM Processes, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH, parent company of Vileda
Connecting sales and service processes to create valuable customer data
Vileda migrated from the SAP Customer Relationship Management application to the SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Commerce Cloud solutions, receiving implementation support from valantic cx. With the SAP Service Cloud solution, customers can contact the company with questions or feedback through several channels that are linked to the solution as tickets. They can call the service hotline or fill out a contact form on the Web site from which service agents can convert contact field data into customer master records. Otherwise, consumers can get in touch through e-mail.
The SAP Sales Cloud solution allows Vileda to manage business-to-business sales activities by gathering and analyzing valuable customer data to make decisions based on a holistic view. Deployed in Belgium so far, the “perfect store” functionality installed on mobile devices is an analytical tool within the solution that sales representatives can use when visiting supermarkets. By answering questions about product placement and assessing the data, they can determine if the agreed-upon product is being displayed on shelves in the right way.
Businesses and institutions typically buy from Vileda Professional through distributors, given their need for cleaning materials such as detergents, as well as Vileda’s cleaning products. Meanwhile, the sales representatives visit these businesses in their settings, such as hospitals or airports, to advise them on which cleaning solutions they need for their individual use case. With its external pricing procedure in SAP ERP integrated with SAP Sales Cloud, sales representatives can send sales quotes directly to business customers. Previously, they used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for this. Vileda Professional wished to include product photographs with the quotes, so it replicated the material master data by doing a loop with the SAP Commerce Cloud solution to extract the photos from there and integrate them into SAP ERP and hence SAP Sales Cloud.
Customer orders in the Web shops are captured in SAP Commerce Cloud, while the delivery and order fulfillment processes occur in SAP ERP. The integration of this solution with the application enables the fastest possible order processing and automatic transfer of inventory and order information to the Web shops. Vileda is rolling out SAP Commerce Cloud, aimed at digital direct sales, in Europe, the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and China.
Global IT Manager Marketing Processes, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH, parent company of Vileda
Making informed decisions with accurate and real-time insights
Rolling out SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud to 400 active users across 20 countries has resulted in high-quality, real-time data for decision-making and problem-solving by Vileda’s service and sales teams. The solutions, which are also benefiting Vileda’s parent company (Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH), are mostly being used in Europe, but America, Asia, and Australia are following suit. The global rollout of SAP Commerce Cloud is all but complete and has given the company a Web presence in each of its countries of operation.
From a difficult start in gaining user acceptance of SAP Sales Cloud, the company’s sales representatives now clearly see the benefits of the solution and how it can support their selling activities. They took a change journey and now properly maintain data in the solution on a daily basis. Vileda’s sales excellence program is helping train the representatives in how to maximize the use of the data.
Taking the number of tickets generated in SAP Service Cloud as an indicator of usage, there’s either the same or a higher number of tickets each month. This shows that the solution is being used regularly and that customers are increasingly making contact through the Web site. The service teams bought in to SAP Service Cloud from the outset as they realized it made their jobs easier due to the centralized data and the ability to analyze tickets compared to using Microsoft Outlook. The reporting functionality in the solution means that Vileda is made aware of any serious issues with its products early on. By integrating material and customer master data from the SAP ERP application into the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud solutions, the company can focus on certain material numbers and conduct reporting based on a single material.
By entering material codes as well as product categories in sales opportunities and using this data in the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution, Vileda Professional has noticed an improvement of more than 10% in the sales forecast deviation in certain countries. This is having a strong impact on various processes along the supply chain and product availability to the end users.
Global IT Manager CRM Processes, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH, parent company of Vileda
Investigating integration with social media and intelligent sales
Vileda is piloting further integration functionality of SAP Service Cloud. In the United Kingdom, it’s investigating social media integration, where customer requests or comments made on Facebook and Twitter feed directly into the solution. The amount of available data is subject to privacy settings on the accounts, but at the very least, the company receives a message that someone has contacted it, and the service agent has the option to answer directly from Facebook or Twitter.
Due to a particular interest in using machine learning to facilitate more efficient sales planning, it’s also considering a limited trial with the intelligent sales add-on for SAP Sales Cloud. At the moment, distributors are using the Vileda Web site to view products in a catalog format but not to order them. The company is therefore working on developing a professional Web shop where distributors can place orders directly in a self-service format.
Featured partner
valantic CX is passionate about the customer experience (CX). The company comprises more than 800 CX experts at 42 locations throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. With in-depth digitalization know-how, it combines strategy, design, technology, and marketing into a creative work of art underpinned by CX leadership.
About Vileda Professional
Vileda Professional is a world leader in developing and manufacturing innovative cleaning solutions used to clean controlled environments, including clean rooms and healthcare facilities.