Würth: 6x faster sales with improved delivery and payment processes

Challenge

Würth Serbia’s marketing and sales departments often struggled with efficiently communicating promotions to customers. The process was tedious as sales representatives had to do this alone, which sometimes resulted in difficulties to reach goals, such as clearing overstock.

Further, there were situations where there was a lack of communication throughout the delivery process. Since information about the time of delivery was not communicated efficiently, customers were not able to properly organize the acceptance of products.

Würth’s sales team also had to collect outstanding balances from customers who missed their invoice payment due dates. Since sales reps had to contact each customer individually, this tedious and ineffective process led to some customers having the issue of bad debt with Würth.

As Würth’s customer base grew, they realized it would not be feasible for their sales representatives to handle these problems in this way. Würth knew that in order to deliver the customer experience they needed to remain a leading brand, it was time to implement a new means of customer communication that would streamline their current processes.

Solution

The implementation of Infobip’s omnichannel solution was done on multiple layers to quickly sell overstock items, increase successful deliveries, and automate the debt collection process.

Through the Infobip platform, these three channels were used to quickly sell overstock items in their warehouses. In order to ensure customers received these informative messages, they structured an SMS failover plan that would first send messages to specifically targeted industries through Email and Viber; if messages were not successfully delivered through Viber, the failover system would send them to customers through SMS.

Further, Würth integrated the Infobip API into their ERP system to automate SMS notifications. They sent these notifications to customers throughout the delivery process which increased the probability of the right people being at the drop off location to make for successful delivery.

Würth also used automated SMS notifications to tackle their problem of debt collection. They used a specially made algorithm to send outstanding balance reminders to customers at various steps in the process:

This helped Würth and their customers keep track of these balances, increasing the likelihood of payment.

Result

Würth saw results immediately in their first campaign. By incorporating an omnichannel solution, the company was able to scale its business. Communicating new promotions to their customers now takes minutes. With this new process, they experienced 6x faster sales – what used to be sold in 30 days is now sold in five.

Through this new implementation, Würth saw an improvement in their customer satisfaction. The process of sending outstanding payment notifications was also streamlined to provide enough time for customers to respond with payment in the appropriate time frame – decreasing the problem of bad debt. By implementing an automated and reliable way of communicating with customers, Würth’s sales and marketing teams can focus more on selling and less on administrative tasks, like arranging deliveries and debt collection.