Page 59 - CBM17

~ Intershop ~

aniel Tholander, Director of Commercial In the early stages of running on Intershop, pilot customers
Excellence at Rockwool, laughs when he were a bit confused, though. The Rockwool team created a
Dtalks about internal change management: platform that was too fancy for B2B!
“Yes, we called it RockCommerce. We like the Rock
name; it has a nice ring to it internally. You know, “The Intershop platform can be mistakenly taken for a B2C
when you sell such a project to your organisation, it platform because of the ease of functionality and also the
makes it much easier when you brand a product like look and feel. We invested quite a lot in the design and UX
that!” of it, for example, in reducing the check-out process from five
to three clicks. However, we quickly found out that we had
Daniel is responsible for commercial excellence at Rockwool. to tone it down a bit because our pilot customers didn’t think
The organisation is operating globally, with headquarters out- they were on the commerce platform!
side of Copenhagen, Denmark. They have 46 manufacturing
facilities, from Thailand, China, and Russia, all the way over We wanted to make sure that when you enter the platform,
to North America. They produce stone wool, thin “fibres” that you quickly see some of the latest transactions and some
derive from molten stone and that are tremendously effective relevant extras. But you need to make sure not to be mis-
in insulating walls. taken for a regular B2C website. That was indeed a lesson we
learned. Although the new platform definitely has some bet-
Steering global e-commerce centrally ter functionality and improved look and feel, just be careful
“Within my role, I am responsible for ensuring that our sales that you don’t turn it into too much of a B2C platform.”
team has the adequate tools and the supportive processes
they need. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we from the A slow deployment ensures that customer needs are truly met.
headquarters decide how they’re supposed to work and which And that can mean not implementing every possible feature
tool they’re supposed to take on, but we do try to do our best or tool: “In Germany, 50% of our orders last year came from
to actually have more centralised steering on what tools and fax machines. If you are a 55/60-year-old procurement pro-
what processes we have.” fessional, you’ve been doing this all your life. You have your
own processes on how you file certain procurement requests.
For Rockwool, e-commerce is the outcome of a very thorough Then it may not be to your benefit to change that process!”
and long-term digitalisation initiative. “We’ve been going
through quite a digitalisation journey over the past five years, Challenges in terms of B2B self-services
focusing mainly on our backend services to ensure that they Changing user behaviour in order to increase efficiency for
work properly so that we can actually feed them effectively to both the customer and the manufacturer is one of the chal-
a commerce platform. For us, it’s kind of imperative that we lenges of digitalisation at Rockwool: “Our customers can
have a commerce platform that actually delivers the services easily get on the commerce platform for an invoice request,
and the transactional value that we want, but also that our a change of pricing, or a quote request. We have all these
customers can realise and see a benefit from these services.” features in place. So why do they want to call and maybe sit
15 minutes in a queue instead of just doing it themselves?
Although the backend was well prepared, deploying B2B on- It’s our current task to explain that to the customer and show
line shops is something that Rockwool don’t rush. So far, only them the benefits of that.”
three countries have access to the Intershop-based portal:
France, Germany, Spain and soon, the UK. Continuous development - with new user journeys
“Now that our developers know the platform so well in terms
“We’re ensuring that in each market, we address the right of benefits and limitations, we will redo some of our customer
customers and that we have the right approach there. We journeys. It doesn’t have to be a four-day workshop. We’ll try
also want to ensure that in the local market, the manage- to see what we can do in a few hours, just to highlight a few
ment team there know what they’re doing, they know how things that we want to optimise.
to harness our product and know how to engage with their
customers.” Of course, then we put customers on the spot and say: Okay,
for this particular service or for this particular piece of in-
A B2B platform that looks like B2C formation, what would be the most effective way for you to
Rockwool customers have had access to a basic procure- engage with the platform? And this is what I think is a good
ment platform for the past 10 years now. It still exists in iteration process to have.”
some regions but lacks the expected features in terms of user
experience. Do you want to get more insights into the digitalisation of
Rockwool? Watch the expert panel now and explore deeper
into t heir challenges and solutions! ••

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