Höffner

The Situation

Höffner is a German furniture retailer. Founded in 1874 by Rudolf Höffner, it became Berlin’s biggest furniture retailer. Based in the eastern part of Berlin, the company ceased to operate after 1945. In 1967 Kurt Krieger bought the rights to the name “Höffner” and the retail brand became a part of the Krieger Gruppe.

With over 110 years of experience, Krieger Gruppe has 80 locations, employs 11,000 people and generates over €2 billion in annual turnover. The Group includes retail, logistics, media and digital agencies and project development and shopping center management. Höffner sits within the retail arm of the Krieger Gruppe that includes brands such as Möbel Kraft, Sconto and Sofa.de. 

Retail is Krieger Gruppe’s biggest industry growth sector. With the recent boom of eCommerce, Krieger is focused on ways to grow and improve their online business and improve their customer experience. 

Traditionally, the customer service department relied on telephone and email to funnel customer requests into effectively 25 service agents that managed 170,000 support requests a month on average and covered 6 languages.

The Challenge

As the online business grew, the customer service team found themselves drowning in repetitive, common requests. Typical requests included delivery times, returns, invoice and product-related questions. The customer service team needed a better way to deal with the common requests and looked to automation that would allow them to scale their service offering while their online business grew. They needed a solution that would also give them flexibility to seamlessly meet unexpected peak times. 

An extra challenge the team faced, and had to consider when looking for possible technology solutions to help them manage their workload, was their need to easily integrate all of their customer service technology stack together. They wanted to balance having a setup that was sophisticated enough to help them improve their efficiency and effectiveness but still easy enough for them to own and maintain on an ongoing basis.

The Solution

As a progressive and forward looking company, Höffner knew that technology could help them achieve their goal of growing while still maintaining a high service level in the most efficient and cost effective way. After careful consideration, Höffner selected Dixa’s chatbot solution to enable their customers to self-serve and find answers easily and effectively.

With Dixa, Höffner learned they could start quickly, analyze the data being gathered through every conversation, and continue to improve their customer service experience in a highly secure way. The Dixa team built an integration so that Höffner’s chatbot can read CSV files that are managed and updated from Höffners existing customer service tools. Onboarding only took 1 week and their chatbot was built, tested and live within 3 weeks. 

Höffner-Assistent now guides customers to find the answers to common questions and the service agents have the valuable time they need to deal with the more complex customer queries. Starting with Höffner’s bot in November 2021, Krieger Gruppe launched chatbots for Möbel Kraft and Sconto within 30 days from first launch. Höffner now has a total of 6 chatbots across all their brands.

Looking to improve the customer experience from initial automated conversation to order delivery, Krieger Gruppe also decided to combine the power of Dixa with that of PAQATO, the all-in-one tool for the parcel journey. The Dixa-PAQATO integration makes it easy for companies to use the customer data they have to create a seamless delivery experience. Using the power of automation, customers receive personalized package journey communications and customer service agents can avoid those ‘where’s my package’ calls. Customers receive instant status updates throughout the entire post purchase journey to create an exceptional customer service experience. In Höffner’s case, delivery times are now accurately communicated to customers so they know exactly where their package is en route and when they can expect to receive it.

Höffner are currently planning to build deeper integrations with Dixa’s chatbot functions that allow users to request things such as delivery information, payment status, or furniture availability in a specific store to further drive the level of automation.