Customers
Our goal is to build strong partnerships with our customers
We align our businesses with the needs and expectations of our customers. To consistently deliver high-quality products, solutions and services that satisfy their requirements, we work closely with them during the development process and we provide the care they need through a networked support organization spanning all our operating units.
Customer Care
The value of direct contact
We seek to build partnerships with customers that are aligned consistently with their needs and requirements. These partnerships are managed by account managers – sales and marketing professionals who look after a particular customer, region, or sales area. They are the primary interface between Siemens and its customer base, and their task is to identify and understand customers’ needs in detail. The greater the demand for overall solutions capable of efficiently networking systems and streamlining business workflow and processes, the more important effective account management becomes.
Customer care is one of the most important tasks of Siemens’ executive management all the way up to the Managing Board. Through our Top Executive Relationship Program, every board member is responsible for the relationship with one of our leading customers. The program seeks to tie our executives into the sales and marketing process proactively and systematically in close collaboration with our account managers and account teams.
Call centers: An open ear for customers
We want all our customers to feel that they are in good hands. To respond effectively to their needs, we operate a number of call centers that our customers can contact 24 hours a day.
Call centers are one of our means to keep in contact with our customers.
Around 40 percent of callers contacting company switchboards can state what kind of assistance they need but do not know whom to contact specifically. Our call center agents can help by checking the Siemens Sales Contact Directory, a catalog with more than 130,000 entries currently queried as many as 4,000 times a day. We are constantly improving the quality of the directory’s keyword index to make the process even more efficient. In fiscal 2004, our call centers took three million calls.
Issues that cannot be resolved immediately are referred to our customer care center in Frankfurt, Germany. Here, agents are on hand to answer questions on all kinds of Siemens products – past and present. The agents rapidly locate the right contact and then try to see the problem through to a satisfactory conclusion.
Quality: Continuous improvement
We go to considerable lengths to make sure our products are as user-friendly as possible. At usability labs in Munich, Princeton and Beijing, our engineers, IT specialists, designers, and psychologists optimize our products’ and computer software’s user interfaces, partly by observing test subjects working with our products and prototypes.
The quality of our final products depends to a substantial degree on the quality of the individual components and materials used. This means we place particular emphasis on finding reliable suppliers, and we regularly check the quality of goods delivered. Vendors who wish to work with us are required to comply with international norms and standards. Prospective suppliers can find out more about our basic requirements and submit applications through our click2procure Web site.
Cross Selling
One-stop shop
For customers building factories, we can do more than just supply high-quality control, building, and communication technology, we can also offer power-supply, instrumentation and control systems and can plan the entire project virtually on computer systems.
In the future, we intend to emphasize our unique portfolio more than ever. Until now, many of our customers have seen Siemens from just one side, and are only aware of one of our competencies. To bring about a change in this area, we are stepping up our efforts in systematic account management and cross selling as part of the Siemens One initiative.
The goal of the initiative is to gain greater traction from synergies between Siemens’ Sectors and Regions. Increasingly, our Sectors’ sales units will promote Siemens One by offering products and services from the company’s entire portfolio rather than just their own. Large-scale projects like airports, hospitals and sports arenas in particular give us the chance to demonstrate our versatility and our breadth of skills.
Stadiums: Technology for the world of sport
Siemens was among the first companies to qualify as a partner for Euro 2004, the European soccer championship, in Portugal. We played an active part in constructing nine of the ten stadiums, supplying, among other things, the electrical infrastructure, low- and medium-voltage systems, electronic safety and security systems, voice and data networks, and lighting systems. In total, six of our former Groups were involved.
The Summer Olympics in Athens were another high-profile sporting event in 2004. Greece spent around €1 billion on security for the athletes and the spectators. Siemens succeeded in preparing an overall concept that convinced the organizers, as no other vendor was capable of supplying and integrating so many different systems – everything from surveillance cameras to systems for vehicle location and access control, and electronic networks to support the security forces. Siemens supplied 65,000 different products, systems, and solutions.
Safe and efficient airports
For many of us, mobility is a fundamental need. We want to be able to travel from one place to another as quickly and as safely as possible, and we are less and less willing to take delays in our stride – when traveling by air, road or rail. As air traffic volumes continue to expand, airport handling processes need to be as smooth as possible to keep airport users – airlines, freight forwarders, and air travelers – satisfied. This means airport operators need to focus on rapid handling, user friendliness, and cost efficiency.
Baggage handling in particular is a benchmark of airport efficiency. Typically, a major airport can process between 15,000 and 20,000 items of baggage an hour. The leaders in baggage handling include Charles de Gaulle in Paris, Barajas in Madrid, and Franz-Josef-Strauss Airport in Munich. All of them transport enormous baggage volumes with the aid of our fast-track systems, which move passengers’ bags rapidly and reliably, even at peak times.
Services
Superior service creates value for customers
Customers today can source the goods and services they need with vendors anywhere in the world. This means that simply supplying good products and systems is not sufficient to build strong and successful customer relationships. Instead, it’s essential for businesses to differentiate themselves from other vendors by being more responsive – by offering customer-specific solutions that create additional value.
The Energy Sector's services
Our Energy Sector has scored a notable success in recent years by greatly expanding its service offering – to the point that services now account for 40 percent of the Sector's net sales. Engaging customers in intensive dialogue has played a considerable role here. By asking them what they want and where they thought problems lay, our people at Energy have been able to come up with new ideas for services and complete solution packages, time and again.
The Energy Sector’s spectrum of services now ranges from needs-driven, individual service callouts to long-term maintenance agreements and even business models in which Siemens actually operates generating facilities on behalf of the power utilities. Energy employees also service and maintain other vendors’ components, enabling the Sector to fulfill a common wish among customers – to deal with just one service partner.
By standardizing the handling and forwarding of inquiries in call centers and by constantly monitoring installations worldwide through just two Power Diagnostic Centers – one in Germany and another in the U.S. – Energy is able to immediately notify service teams on the ground whenever they are needed. The Sector can even guarantee that a specialist will be present on site anywhere in the world within a matter of hours.
Full service for rail carriers
Our Mobility Division is a full-service, turnkey supplier. Besides supplying 30 Desiro electrical multiple unit trains to Britain’s National Express Group, Mobility is also responsible for servicing and maintaining the units and has set up its own depot in Northampton for that purpose. The 20-year full-service agreement covers an entire range of servicing, including the supply of spare parts.
To keep the trains’ servicing downtime short and to maximize availability for passenger services, maintenance follows the pit-stop principle: Components are switched out completely, and parts are serviced once they have been removed from the trains.