Vaillant – Improving customer experience and warranty
The Vaillant Story
For more than 140 years, Vaillant has been setting the standards in the heating market, creating products that have revolutionised the industry, from water heaters in the early 1900’s, to pioneering the ‘combi’ boiler over 35 years ago.
Today they are as proud to be leading the way in renewable technologies, developing systems which utilise sustainable sources of energy. As one of Europe’s leading heating technology manufacturers, ‘thinking ahead’ is a culture which is embraced throughout their business.
What was the objective?
Vaillant required an application that could integrate their Call Centre and Customer Database systems to ensure that they received payment for parts & services that were outside the limitations of guarantee. This allowed call centre staff to allocate a standard call out fee to an authorised payment card.
What was the challenge?
Vaillant was experiencing an increase in the number of service calls where the work was falling outside of their standard product warranty and in some cases was unrelated to their products.
Examples of this would be; where a product was outside the term of its warranty and the customer would need to pay for the call-out and parts required to complete the repair; or in some circumstances other areas of the heating system such as the room thermostat or general plumbing of the system.
As a business that has a high focus on customer service Vaillant would always help the customer but needed to recover the costs of repairs.
The Outcome
The turnaround for this project from the initial brief to launch was six weeks. Once DeeperThanBlue had built the initial service on the IBM Cloud, it allowed Vaillant to trial this with around 90 call centre operatives using the application to handle just over 30% of the 320,000 transactions processed annually by the company through their contact centre.
Delivering the Solution and Process Turnaround
The Vaillant application was developed using IBM’s Bluemix Hybrid Cloud solution running two IBM services – Liberty for Java application server and SQL for database management working through a standard web browser. DeeperThanBlue integrated the solution into the Stripe payment gateway for card authorisations. Data is also fed from core business systems such as Salesforce Service Desk.
With this being cloud-based the application allowed Vaillant engineers to connect to the service while on the road, while head office can complete transactions immediately, where required.
We couldn’t fault the execution of this project in any way, the development and implementation of the application has gone more smoothly than we could ever have imagined, and it looks fantastic too. It does exactly what we want, and as a result it is already having a positive effect on our bottom line.
Andy Naylor, Service Commercial Manager at Vaillant
IBM Hybrid Cloud – Bluemix
At DeeperThanBlue, we use the IBM Hybrid Cloud development platform, Bluemix, to develop applications using our own knowledge combined with the catalogue of services and APIs provided by IBM. The nature of this platform means that application development is rapid and fluid, with quick turnaround, and the ability for the app to be managed remotely.
Want to know more about how we develop apps on IBM Cloud - Bluemix?
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