Customer Management
WACKER provides products and services that benefit its customers. Satisfied customers are the basis of our success. To steadily increase their satisfaction, we are in constant dialogue with not only customers, but also suppliers and logistics providers.
Our customer relationship management (CRM) system provides effective support. Called Salesforce, our new CRM system contains customer profiles and all other relevant information about our customers. Salesforce complies with GDPR requirements.
We use this system to support key Sales activities, such as correspondence, the recording of business opportunities and the processing of samples. Complaints, too, are entered into this CRM system and tracked until our final reply has been sent to the customer. Standardized measures, some of which are initiated automatically, ensure that both the customer and our team in charge are always kept up to date on the complaint status. This helps us to enhance processes, and stops errors from recurring.
WACKER offers existing and prospective customers a further service: the WACKER Infoline. Specialists provide advice on products and related applications by phone or email. If someone asks a question, they get initial feedback within eight hours and a detailed answer within 48 hours.
We regularly solicit feedback from our customers about the quality of our products and services. WACKER POLYMERS, for example, conducts annual customer surveys. Well over 100 Western European customers of the Construction Polymers business team took part in an online survey in 2018, answering questions regarding, for example, customer satisfaction with our products and services, and sustainability and digitalization. As in the past, our surveys and analyses confirmed positive customer feedback during the reporting period.
Our chemical business is determined by three customer categories: key accounts, customers, and distributors. At the end of the reporting period, WACKER had 36 key accounts, with whom we generated some 24 percent (2017: 25 percent) of our chemical-division sales. More than 50 percent of sales in 2018 stemmed from about 8,000 active relationships with other customers (2017: 55 percent). Around 23 percent came from distributors (2017: 20 percent). 20 key distributors accounted for about 50 percent of all distributor sales (with 50 key distributors accounting for around 65 percent in 2017).