Smile X Somfy
- 09 May 2022
How can digital technology significantly reduce phone calls and handle thousands of orders from small installers? A journey to operational excellence with Somfy.
Somfy is a French industrial group specializing in motorization, automation of housing and building openings, and alarm systems.
Somfy in figures:
- + de 1,3 billion turnover
- 1500 employees
- +30% turnover in 2020
15 years ago, the company created a B2B digital platform in order to gain productivity in the processing of orders for their products, a closed platform on which to connect. This is a major digital transformation for Somfy as well as for their end customers who are used to ordering by fax or telephone. Somfy sees this new Self Care platform as a complementary channel to their sales force.
Another innovation is that the digital platform now provides the opportunity to promote products. It was therefore necessary to imagine and implement marketing animation, another novelty in the organizational model of the French company. The promotion, previously carried out only in B2C (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.), has been invited on the B2B channel throughout the year thanks to unique promotions (e.g. alarm packs).
The target being mainly installers who are used to working with the same products (reliable products, which they know well), introducing new ranges to them is already not an easy job, but is also complex to achieve 100% in digital. Indeed, you have to educate your customers, answer their questions, show them the interest of the new ranges. On the other hand, the customer knowledge provided by the “closed” site makes it possible to further develop this information, to personalize it: Somfy analyzes the behavior of customers online.
An email about a new product was opened and generated a click to the site? Somfy considers the customer as a marketing target and starts a Marketing Automation approach.
With Smile, Somfy has deployed more than 15 B2B and B2C sites around the world, as well as a marketplace for experts to give them access to their products, training courses and showrooms.
If history had to be rewritten today in order to share feedback, Somfy would adopt different starting assumptions: not only the platform now closed would have been open to prospects - allowing them to discover the offer and become customers by placing their first order - but also e-commerce codes (UX, UI, shipping in less than 24 hours, etc.) would have been included in the fundamentals of the project. The Somfy teams would have, moreover, been reinforced with e-commerce expert profiles to facilitate the internal transition.