Calling for excellence

We no longer live in the era of horse-drawn carriages or carrier pigeons. Today, customer feedback and requests come by the hundreds via email, Facebook posts, Google reviews, or phone. Excellent customer service is, therefore, more important than ever. Especially on the phone, customers don't want to be stuck on hold, they want fast and personal advice.

As a leading partner for construction professionals, Hilti is known for excellent customer service on all channels. To keep it that way in the future, we have developed a visionary concept for more efficient and yet personalized telephone support.

Different service teams around the globe

On the phone with customers, a lot of data and to-dos are generated in a very short time that is often not systematically recorded. Suddenly, dozens of post-its are piling up on customer service agents' desks, leading to frequent errors. To develop a better and less error-prone approach for Hilti on a global scale, we evaluated the work processes, pain points, and needs of different customer service teams around the world.

A task-driven cockpit

With a new task-driven cockpit solution, customer service agents, regardless of their specific role and expertise, can easily start the required actions and tools to help the customer on the phone in the best and fastest way possible. The clearly structured and intuitive user interface is configured so that the most common use cases, tasks, and processes can be triggered with just a few clicks.

Collaboration across groups and regions

Besides qualitative interviews with representatives of each customer service group, we ran contextual inquiries in three major customer service centers (UK, DE, CH). Based on our results we conducted a three-day co-design workshop with 25 participants across several business units around the world. Together we mapped the current user journey and developed the target user journey.

Efficiency and personalization

Efficiency is one of the most important KPIs for a customer service team. We ensured efficient processing of customer requests by providing context-sensitive data and reducing visual clutter on the screen. For example, when a customer calls, they are identified by their phone number and a customer info screen pops up automatically. The customer service agent sees all relevant customer data, a contact history, a transaction list, and smart lead suggestions triggered by the system.

Assistance and process automation

In order to make the daily work more efficient, and less error-prone and to guarantee a full focus on the customers’ needs, we introduced a smart system that provides support and automation without compromising the personal aspect of customer care.

• —Task management
  The system generates task management to offer suggestions for upcoming tasks related to different customers.
• —Smart search
  A universal search scans the entire Hilti world to find product information or customer-specific data.
• —Prefilling function
  The system prefills documents, such as customer forms, or anticipates and suggests entire texts or text elements for new tickets, based on individual customer contexts.
• —Notification & documentation
  Automated notification and documentation in customers' history.

High-performing teams thanks to user-centricity 

There are many ways to unlock untapped potential and improve customer service for businesses. However, the trick is to develop solutions that don't undermine people but involve them. That's why we always develop digital solutions that adapt to people's needs, not the other way around.

The new concept for Hilti is based on the needs and tasks of their customer service agents. Thanks to close exchange with stakeholders and globally conducted user tests, we identified unexploited potential and developed a new vision of what the future work can look like – namely more efficient and less error-prone - for happier customer service and ultimately more satisfied customers.

Project facts

Project team