Valmet Customer Portal
The new customer portal connects all Valmet´s global digital services behind one user interface. One that is easy to use, and unifies the user experiences.
Valmet wanted to unify its customer experience in digital channels. Before starting the project Valmet had multiple different applications and services for their customers; each service supporting different customer needs. Applications and services were developed in different business units and the time had come to evaluate which services created real value for the customers and what was still missing from the overall customer viewpoint.
At the same time Valmet was renewing its service strategy and had launched a Shared Journey Forward concept with four selected commitments. These commitments were selected to line the service model and were supposed to go through all their operations and customer interactions. With this strategic direction in mind, Valmet wanted to improve the customer experience and build a digital service that would create a competitive advantage for the company. Valmet had a desire to break their industry´s traditional practices by creating a pioneer vision for the future´s digital customer experience. The aim was to renew, clarify and uniform digital services and make them user friendly, but also find new digital ways to serve customers.
When designing the portal, our approach was to find out the true needs of the users; both from business and individual viewpoints. So we involved and collaborated with Valmet's customers & employees in every step of the development process. They wanted to see which are the pain points in customer collaboration, and take the service to the next level through digital services and processes. This was done by interviews and workshops on three continents.
We needed to find out not only what the customers actually wanted, but what kind of services the customers were willing to pay for or invest in. Even if the customers wouldn’t pay for the usage of a service, prioritizing and calculating the overall value of it, helped us find out what parts of the services could be used as a competitive edge for selected customer groups, and what the features were that customers would really use in their busy everyday life.
After customer needs were clarified, Valmet and Roger mapped business processes, that are used to make services true. Together, each party identify those parts, that required a change in Valmet´s existing service processes.
The last phase covered evaluation of technical ability and development needs. A fully utilized customer data allows to create targeted content to each user. In practise we embedded existing services to the Community framework using canvas and external data access technologies seamlessly provided for the user with single-sign-on -Salesforce’s Lightning Out for publishing contents and functionality from Salesforce directly to the public site.
Valmet´s customer portal is constantly developed further with content and features, that will change Valmet and its customer´s daily actions.
Valmet´s special strength is, that its customers and experts have mutual trust between them worldwide. Their customers desire to be in touch with the experts as much as possible. Hence the leading themes of the customer portal were a close cooperation and social relations of experts. All the content in the portal is meant to strengthen the cooperation, engage community & customer relation.
Today, customers expect a digital communication with companies to be as easy as in their everyday life. In the era of smart phones, people are not willing to wait or search for information while dealing with companies. To ensure that, customers´ feelings and actions were mapped during working days. Thus, in development phase of portal´s content and user interface these features were able to be considered: user's urgency, criticalness of reply times and familiarity of experts.
Part of the new services requires change in customers´ behavior. To ensure that, the user interface of the service is easy to use and tempting – for example, it is designed with a help of Behavioral Design -methods that are based on subconscious patterns of behaviour.
The portal combining Valmet's digital services is modular. With a help of the modular structure, Valmet´s digital service development, management and learning are phased easily and in a customer centric way. Each module covers and supports a specific customer need and also their purchasing process. Services that are included in the modules utilize widely the customer data. Trough the services, the customer data is stored during every login. Modules work alone but also together, which makes targeting possible to different customer groups.
“Valmet customer portal helps to develop Valmet's customerships and strengthen our shared journey forward. We want this portal to be something that truly responds to our customers’ needs. ”
Petri Lakka, Director, Vice President, Services Development, Valmet