Accelerating integration. Enhancing satisfaction.

Vaillant Group Austria empowers superior service in the cloud

Vaillant Group, headquartered in Germany, is a market leader in heating technology with more than 16,000 employees and 150 years of experience. Its Austrian subsidiary, Vaillant Group Austria GmbH, offers energy-saving and environmentally friendly systems for heating, ventilation and hot water.

The company’s high service quality requirements could no longer be met with its previous contact center — it was too rigid, inflexible and complicated. It lacked modern functionalities and was unable to provide satisfactory reporting.

“We had to explore the market, and we are confident that we made the right choice with Genesys Cloud,” said Michael Graffe, Head of IT at Vaillant Group Austria.

No time to lose

Vaillant defined clear requirements and precise specifications that the new solution had to meet.

“We work very customer-focused on the basis of Salesforce,” said Graffe. “That’s why we need an out-of-the-box solution that’s easy to integrate and requires little effort on our part. The existing solution didn’t meet these requirements — not to mention the necessary Salesforce customizations. With the previous system, the company had struggled for several years to get the functionality it needed. But with the Genesys solution, it was a push of a button.”

In fact, it only took two weeks from implementation to the go-live date. The callback function was available quickly, as was call recording. Voicebots for the IVR were added swiftly, as was the Salesforce integration with both customer classification and routing options.

“The feature set was really strong from the beginning,” said Graffe. “Thanks to Genesys Cloud, our teams can now manage a callback within 15 minutes. This wasn’t possible with the old system.”

Reporting at its best

Vaillant achieved another critical requirement outlined in their specifications: detailed reporting. The Genesys solution provides the ability to extract detailed information effortlessly, offering insights into contact center operations. This meticulous reporting capability contributed to a complete view of the entire contact center’s performance.

“Whether it was directly Genesys or our implementation partner infinit.cx who was involved, the promises made were kept,” said Graffe. “And 90% of the measures that we designed together on the drawing board worked the way we wanted them to. We only had to make a few adjustments.”

Reliable background operations

This collaboration has rapidly proven itself not only in terms of functionality, but also in day-to-day operations. On any given day, Vaillant Austria has about 90 customer service employees, rising to nearly 130 when external service providers are included.

Calls are routed 24/7 according to the skill sets available. The Salesforce solution determines whether the caller is a partner, business user or end customer, then Genesys Cloud routes the caller to the right internal or external person. This combination of technologies has resulted in a significant reduction in contact center queue time.

“Customer satisfaction has increased significantly, and our average handle time has been significantly reduced,” said Graffe.

Vaillant Austria has maintained its service level while increasing customer satisfaction. Thanks to intelligent call management, the maximum waiting time has been reduced by 53.1% and the average waiting time for callers by 50%.

Empowering internal experts

Vaillant experts appreciate the ability to manage their solutions with in-house resources.

“It’s great to have reliable and strong partners,” said Graffe. “However, we also like to understand what’s happening in the background and be able to make configuration changes, if necessary.”

Graffe and his team appreciate that Genesys Cloud is a full-featured platform with effortless updates and new capabilities. “The updates give us a lot of positive changes that are automatically delivered in the cloud,” he added.

With its initial success, Vaillant has a clear rollout plan. The integration with Microsoft Teams has already been completed. When an agent takes a customer call, their status in Microsoft Teams is automatically set to “engaged.” This smart feature helps integrate back-office staff into service operations, such as second level support. Now, Vaillant specialists are already available on demand. In the future, technicians can also be integrated.

Ready for artificial intelligence

In addition to planning a web shop and SMS integration, the Vaillant roadmap also focuses on merging the Genesys Cloud platform with its SAP system.

“We’re focusing on artificial intelligence, which will certainly find its way into our contact center,” said Graffe.

Vaillant plans to significantly expand its use of bots via Genesys Cloud.

“The first step will be a small-scale rollout, and if it is successful, we will certainly do a large-scale rollout,” concluded Graffe. “Last but not least, Vaillant is planning new contact centers in several countries, with the installation in Austria serving as a lighthouse project.”