How Siemens increased productivity and made CX more human with AI

Europe’s largest manufacturing company needed a way to centralize data and automate high-volume requests. With Zendesk and Ultimate, they were able to free up agents so they had more time for human-to-human interactions while also streamlining productivity. 

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86% CSAT score
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600 Zendesk users
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23% productivity increase in Nordics
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7+ languages

Why Siemens trusts Ultimate + Zendesk with the success of its support

Siemens at a glance

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The customer

Siemens is Europe’s biggest manufacturing company, serving customers from large enterprises to small sole traders in a wide range of industries.

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The market

They serve a global customer base in regions including France, Spain, Poland, the US, Germany, Nordics and the UK.

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The support team

What started as a small deployment with one support team has now expanded to over 600 Zendesk licences across all their regions.

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The channels

Siemens offers automated support through ticket automation and a seamless integration with their CRM, Zendesk.

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The situation

For Siemens, CX as a differentiator has always been a core value. But with agents relying on email inboxes, spreadsheets, and other applications to track customer data, delivering on that value was a challenge.

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The solution

With Zendesk Enterprise Suite and Ultimate’s ticket automation solution, Siemens found a holistic way to view and manage all customer data and automate support across channels.

Getting started with Zendesk + Ultimate

Following the successful implementation of the Zendesk platform, Siemens wanted to further improve the customer experience through the integration of AI. The company opted to automate with Ultimate because of a few key factors.

The first being that Ultimate could build an AI solution directly into Zendesk. The second reason addresses the challenge of having multiple languages. With Ultimate’s polyglot AI model, responses to customer questions are made directly in the native language, as opposed to translating into English first. The integration of Ultimate also enables the individual regions to implement AI at a pace that works for them.

“When we look across all our customer contacts, about 30% of them are data requests or information requests. We felt that with a good AI solution, we could automate that. So within three years, we want 15% of our responses to be automated. While this may seem conservative, we firstly want to ensure we are providing a really great customer experience, and then gradually push it out,” says Steven Franklin, Head of Global Customer Services at Siemens.

To integrate AI into Zendesk, Steven and the Siemens team worked closely with their Zendesk Customer Success Executive, Peter Eshkeri, together with the team at Ultimate. “We have been on a journey with Zendesk, from the early days of deploying it in a small team. Today we have over 600 licenses and it’s deployed across all our regions. Bringing Ultimate into this partnership, I think we have a really compelling solution for our customers,” says Steven. It’s a partnership grounded in shared values and goals. Together, solutions are developed to streamline the customer journey.

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“We don’t operate as three separate companies, we operate as one company working together to find the best means of solving a problem."

Steven Franklin
Head of Global Customer Services, Siemens

CSAT score 86%
Productivity increase in Nordics 23%
Languages 7+
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AI use case spotlight #1: Providing proactive support

  • Steven and his team found that negative customer experiences often happen when a customer has been given an answer, but there’s an obvious follow-up that has been ignored or hasn’t been picked up.
  • Zendesk, Siemens and Ultimate jointly developed an integration in which the AI would respond to high-volume requests automatically, such as proactively sending a copy of invoices to a customer.
  • In addition to sending proactive messages, the AI could detect what else the customer was asking and preempt some of those questions with appropriate responses, as well as gathering information and context for the human agents.
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AI use case spotlight #2: Freeing up agent time for value-added interactions

  • Siemens wanted their agents to be able to concentrate on valued human-to-human interactions, rather than focusing on low-value transactions, such as sending invoices or standard information.
  • By integrating with their back-office systems, their bot could access customer data and provide it to their customers without agent involvement.
  • Automation has resulted in reduced agent handle times, since the bot can handle basic requests as well as populate the ticket with data to help the agent work more efficiently — resulting in a streamlined customer journey and enabling value-add interactions with customers. 

The success story

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A holistic solution

The strong partnership between Zendesk, Ultimate and Siemens means that they operate seamlessly as one company, not three — working together to find the best means of solving a problem.

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Freeing up agent time

As well as automating responses to common queries, Siemens’ bot uses AI to populate tickets with data. This speeds up handling times and gives their agents more time to focus on value-added customer interactions.

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Better data visibility

Instead of using different platforms and applications, all customer data is in one place, so agents can stay within Zendesk. In this omnichannel environment, including phone, email, and WhatsApp, they can efficiently communicate and answer customer queries.

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Productivity gains

Since introducing Zendesk and Ultimate, Siemens have been able to resolve tickets faster, exchange tickets between departments more smoothly, and expedite customer onboarding — resulting in 23% increase in productivity in the Nordics and almost 2x the productivity in France.

Next on their automation journey

With the help of Zendesk and Ultimate, Siemens is on track to achieving a holistic global digital customer journey. As AI has been introduced at different speeds across their various markets, some regions are further ahead and are already experiencing productivity gains. This is translating into increased customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). For instance, the Nordics region is hitting an 86% CSAT rating versus an 83% industry benchmark.

Steven says, “Ultimately, we want to get to the point where we have a holistic global digital customer journey. With Zendesk as the foundation and the various apps and integrations such as Ultimate’s AI sitting on top of that, we are getting closer and closer to achieving that.” 

A version of this case study first appeared on Zendesk's site

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