Understanding and solving our customers’ problems

Martin Kaiser talks about Hager Group’s new brand

Martin Kaiser, General Manager Hager Services, is in charge of developing Hager Group’s latest business area. For the former mobile communications manager, Hager Services is a huge adventure harbouring tremendous opportunities.

“Understanding and solving our customers’ problems”

Mr. Kaiser, when was the last time you, personally, were offered a really good service and what was it?

Oh, it wasn’t all that long ago. The boiler that heats our flat here in Paris suddenly broke down last winter. On a Saturday afternoon, of all days, at around 5 p.m. When I got through to the manufacturer’s maintenance service, I was told they would send someone within 30 minutes to fix our heating. And that’s exactly what they did. We weren’t left freezing over the weekend.

Martin Kaiser has devoted his professional life to services and certainly has a lot to offer Hager Group.

What impression did this experience have on you as a customer?

Clearly, this very satisfactory experience means that when our old boiler needs replacing I will definitely get a replacement from the same manufacturer. Incidentally, I will also be renewing our maintenance contract with them, too.

Conversely, when was the last time you had a very poor customer experience?

I think dissatisfaction always stems from having your hands tied contractually or financially by a service provider. To give you one example: I pay 40 euros a month for my private PayTV provider, although I only use this service for a few minutes a month. When I wanted to switch to a cheaper subscription, I was informed that it was only possible to change contracts at specific times in the year and that the next opportunity would only be in eleven months’ time. That made me feel really mistreated as a consumer.

As General Manager of Hager Services, your main role is to look at service. What exactly is it that interests you so much about this topic that you would devote eight hours of your day to it?

Oh for it to be only eight hours a day (laughing). I’ve spent my entire professional life dealing with services for end customers, first as a junior corporate consultant and then for almost 15 years working for a French mobile communications provider. The profound changes that the mobile communications sector has already undergone are only now beginning to impact the industrial sector. It’s incredibly exciting to transfer everything I’ve done over the past 20 years to an industrial company.

The field of end customer services is a new one for Hager Group. Up to now, wholesalers and tradespeople have been contacts, not end customers.

Indeed, so naturally, it’s a huge challenge for all involved. The question that Daniel Hager put to us was this: how can we get closer to our end customers? And also how can we develop new business models that are aligned to a rapidly changing world? One answer to this question was by offering services for end customers. So we broke into the services sector.

Yet customer-centricity is traditionally one of Hager Group’s strong suits.

That’s correct; however, up to now this customer has always been the electrician. If we want to attract end customers, we need to change the way our sales and maintenance teams operate. Our responsibilities are also changing. As long as there was the middleman electrician between us and the end customer, we weren’t directly responsible. Now it’s up to us to solve our customers’ problems. This has the positive side effect of gaining a much more accurate understanding of their problems of them and their expectations, and thus developing better solutions accordingly.

The service approach not only requires a lot of effort, there is also the risk that something may go wrong. What does the company get out of it?

The service offensive presents a number of advantages for the company. By selling our services online, we are opening ourselves up to a new sales channel and new business areas. Most of all, we’re enriching our existing business areas and solutions with new services.

Can you give us an example?

One example is our smoke detector service package, which we have just launched on the French market. We are now able to offer the same smoke detector, which we previously offered based on a three-phase sales cycle, directly to the customer, along with a five-year service contract with Hager Services. With a premium service provider like us, nowadays customers expect our services to extend beyond the bare product. So, I believe that our new business, as well as the existing business of Hager Group will benefit from our service offer.

Why was a Hager Services brand with its own brand identity specifically created for this?

Hager Group already has master brands such as Berker, Hager and Daitem. It would have been extremely inefficient to establish a service business for each of these brands and for every market. The operator brand Hager Services allows us to cater to them all equally. At the same time, Hager Services is also changing our company processes. Up to now, our markets were largely autonomous. Hager Services pays off if we can reach a maximum number of customers across countries and borders with one single offer. This explains why Hager Services is organised more centrally than other traditional products and services offered by Hager Group.

Hager Services brand is launching some of its first operations on the French market. Why is that?

That’s partly down to me, because I live in France, have some experience in the country and have acquired some talented people here to join us on this collective Hager Services adventure. We also have a smoke detector certified for the French market here that will make an ideal product for our first pilot project. And, finally, the subscription mentality is a lot more widespread in France than in Germany. In France, there are over 500,000 households that have an alarm system with a subscription contract. By contrast, in Germany over 90% of alarm systems are sold as products.

You’ve just initiated a friendly user test with your first Hager Services product, a connected smoke detector. What does this entail?

Well, we’ve launched our website and the service app here and we’ve got new sales channels and a brand new customer segment. This is all new territory for us. So we’re embarking on a ‘friendly user test’ with a few thousand test customers, whose comments and feedback we intend to use to improve our service offer.

The Parisian café where Martin Kaiser answered these questions is called ‘Les enfants perdus’ (‘The lost children’). It is well-known, among other things, for providing excellent service.

And, your first findings?

We’ve learned, for example, that we need to give more support to our customers because they’re independently installing in their own homes our smoke detectors ordered via the website. And, we’re having to give some of them a far greater level of assistance than anticipated.

Hager Group is by no means the only company that is currently discovering the service business for itself. The washing and cleaning multinational Henkel, for example, has been offering subscriptions for washing and cleaning products lately. What’s behind the current boom in service offers?

Changing customer requirements are a key factor. Right now, we’re seeing a generation enter the consumer and job market that has grown up with streaming services like Spotify and Netflix or car sharing services like DriveNow and Car2Go. This new generation of consumers doesn’t want to buy and own products anymore; they would prefer to use services.

Why is this? What’s the story here?

Well, it’s a combination of wanting to and having to. For many young people today, the thought of buying an expensive new car is simply unimaginable. However, they don’t want to pass up on the convenience of mobility, of course. This is presenting a number of opportunities for mobility service providers. Others are simply focusing on other priorities. To many of the young generation, it is now more important to gain interesting life experiences and travel, than cruise around the neighbourhood in a new BMW 3 Series.

With Hager Services, you want to branch out into the areas of security, care, e-mobility and energy. What are the reasons behind this? And why these areas specifically?

Offering customers protection against electric shocks or power failures, for example, is in Hager Group’s DNA. With Hager Services, our aim is to transfer this protective mindset to the world of service provision. We are doing this, for example, by providing security solutions that protect personal property against fire and burglary damage. The same applies to the care sector, where we are assisting care-dependent relatives with AAL services in the comfort of their own homes. With e-mobility charging stations, we are constantly doing our bit to support mobility. And with our energy solutions, we are helping property owners to monitor their own energy consumption and be more energy efficient.

In France, you have just launched a range of services for smoke detectors and anti-intrusion systems. How are things progressing?

We intend to bring our smoke detectors, anti-intrusion systems and AAL services to Germany as well over the course of 2017. There is a possibility that we will start an e-mobility pilot project in the Netherlands. Customers will get a Hager charging station, as well as a Hager Services mobility card to charge their electric cars at all public charging stations.

And although we will be initially focusing on private customers, our services may of course appeal to commercial customers in the medium term as well. And eventually we will be able to assist whole smart cities with our monitoring services, too. So, as you can see, Hager Services has a lot of potential.

What is Hager Services offering its customers that other companies aren’t?

Our unique selling point will be that customers are able to use a single smartphone application to book and manage an array of different services from e-mobility charging stations through to an AAL service for care-dependent relatives. All this will be offered by a company that has already been present in a great many households for decades. To my knowledge, this is a unique set of circumstances.

Of course, all of this depends on customers having even heard of Hager Services beforehand.

Naturally, we’ll have to drum up a lot of support on the market. This will cost money, yet it will open up a lot of new potential sales. For the first time we will be in direct contact with our customers, and as such able to develop much more suitable business models than previously, where feedback was either indirect or non-existent.

What would be the worst thing that could happen to Hager Services?

The biggest mistake would be to promise more than we can ultimately deliver. Maximum transparency when it comes to services and costs is just as important. As I’ve already said, nothing is worse for a customer than feeling as if their hands are tied. Nowadays, customers are accustomed to booking a plane ticket in two clicks and having the device that they ordered today already in their hands by tomorrow. We need to measure ourselves against these standards.

What do your employees and the company need to do to make Hager Services a success?

We need to make a collective effort to enrich our products and solutions with services that target customers along diverse sales channels. If we can achieve this, it will bring about an unbelievable amount of new opportunities for Hager Group.

Thank you for the interview.

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