Providing online sales and services to customers is not anymore ‘nice-to-have’, but in today’s Amazon-world a license for still having business in the future. With younger generations coming into play, this development is even speeding up. Having “tested the waters” before with some Webshop pilots, we have finally decided to launch our own Customer Portal “Outokumpu Connect” in Dec 2022.
Our vision is to transform it into a one-stop-shop for our customers allowing to purchase all Outokumpu materials and interact with us through diverse eServices such as order, delivery and invoice status tracking as well as document management. It is available in 5 languages – English, German, Italian, Polish and French. Over the last months we have step-by-step added more Service Centers to the portfolio and enriched the Portal with more capabilities. Time to ask our customers how they perceive the Portal and to give an outlook about what’s coming next!
Customer Satisfaction Survey
In order to understand how you - our customers - perceive Outokumpu Connect, we have conducted a Customer Satisfaction Survey in CW 05 (29.01.-02.02.2024). From all customers who have ever logged into Outokumpu Connect, 16% have responded to our survey. This is a very promising response rate and we would like to use the opportunity to say thank you – especially for all the additional hints you have given us which allows us to build an even better tool for you going forward.
We have in total asked you 8 questions in the areas of “Overall Satisfaction”, “Onboarding & Customer Service”, “Functionality, Performance & Intuitiveness” as well as “Availability & Prices”. You have given us feedback with the help of a scale from 1 (very unsatisfied) to 10 (very satisfied). On top of that, we have asked you 2 open questions with the possibility to give us feedback on which functionalities you are missing most and on any other Portal-related matter you would like to address. Especially, the answers from those open questions have been very helpful for us.
The Result
The picture below shows you the summary of our Outokumpu Connect Satisfaction Survey.
We are very pleased to hear that you seem overall quite satisfied with Outokumpu Connect and that we seem to perform well compared to our competition. This is obviously a motivation for us to continue working hard on improving. Digital tools shall support us all in our daily work and help us getting more efficient while improving the user experience. However, customer service is and will always be a people business. We are very happy that things seem to interlock in this case. Building up a Portal with an intuitive user interface and adapting it not only to our internal processes, but also your ways of working is complex and takes time. We know that there are still improvement areas, but are glad that we seem to head in the right direction. We hope that Outokumpu Connect has improved your visibility on our stocks and availabilities and that our Portal has helped you to find one or the other interesting material you would otherwise not have spotted.
Planned developments
Our next step is to integrate the mill business to Outokumpu Connect. We will start with Krefeld, Dillenburg and Avesta and expect this to happen for our contract business by mid of the year. Furthermore, we will deep-dive into cut-to-length orders for our contract customers, reordering possibilities for Spot and try to streamline our checkout process. Another priority for this year is our eService. Having the order, delivery and invoice status for our mill business is a target, but also to add more Service Center and mill documents to our document management functionality.
Once more, thank you all for your loyalty to get stainless steel business more digital. Our team is highly motivated to partner with you in this journey. If you have any questions, comments or improvement proposals, please reach out to Support@connect.outokumpu.com.
And of course, we would be glad to welcome you on https://connect.outokumpu.com/login.