Next-level service

“The digital transformation does not stop when it comes to service,” says Jörg Alber, Director of Technical Services and Solutions EMEA at Balluff. Together with an interdisciplinary team, the realignment of all support services in the company began in 2019. Today, the service organization is divided into three so-called service hubs — one for each world region.

In order to avoid decentral tools and different processes in the future, the service, support, and sales processes were digitized and modernized across the entire group. Today, a harmonized ticket system facilitates consistent, automated, and uniform support workflows in all three world regions. A central dashboard gives every service employee anywhere access to the tickets at any time. “This way, we guarantee fast and competent processing and can quickly provide feedback,” Alber explains, adding: “A central contact page gives customers direct access to service ticket processing and shows them how long it takes on average for their request to be answered.”

Connected knowledge

“We quickly realized that there is no off-the-shelf solution on the market that meets our requirements,” says Florian Körner, Head of Digital Transformation and Integration at Balluff, describing the challenges during the implementation. “We had to find the right partner and, above all, really understand the requirements of our colleagues from the specialist departments.” However, the team’s work is not done now that the standardization and digitization of processes and the switch to the ticket system have been completed. “We aim to continuously improve our service processes in order to reach the next level,” Kröner says. The team is currently developing a central platform that makes Balluff's existing knowledge about customers, products, and processes even more readily available. It builds upon the existing product information management system (PIM) and will form the basis for new work processes going forward.

“Our next step is to populate the knowledge database. When a customer submits a technical support request, the system will recommend possible solutions based on the information given,” says Körner, explaining the next steps, adding that, “this saves an enormous amount of time because technical knowledge is shared among all service employees and consistently added to.” An interface for generative AI based on a large language model (LLM) is also currently in the process of being rolled out. The AI-based chatbot BalluffGPT already supports employees today and answers many of their questions.