Success stories

How Daikin maximized user engagement with a centralized portal

Daikin is a leading global manufacturer and supplier of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) equipment’s. Managing sales, R&D and manufacturing teams across different locations, Daikin Europe needed to revitalize their communication with the whole network of customers, partners and distributors.

AmeXio delivered a new platform that allowed the company to go from a scattered and multichannel digital approach to a unique user-centric and personalized global portal.

As one of the largest companies in the world of air conditioning, Daikin provides premium quality indoor climate solutions to all sorts of residential, commercial and industrial customers.

Based in Ostend, Belgium, Daikin Europe is Daikin’s sales, R&D and manufacturing headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, managing five innovative development centers, 17 affiliated companies and a full network of independent distributors.

Merge the several extranets into one main portal that enables interactions between internal and external teams to improve global support

Measure and analyze all digital interactions to predict and develop new ways of increasing customer satisfaction levels

Contemplate scalability and flexibility to respond to the needs arising from Daikin’s evolving, geographically varied and growing business ambition

Ensure adoption and full visibility through user friendly interfaces and responsive design adaptive to all screen sizes and devices.

solution

Solution

As we always do in our digital experience projects, we began with a thorough assessment of existing internal communications tools and services. Then the team built the initial proof of concept, designing some key pages to allow the design to be evaluated and tweaked.

The engagement of Daikin since this early stage of the process proved to be fundamental for its success. The close collaboration between AmeXio’s team and Daikin was a key element trough the functional analysis, while identifying all the needs of the different users. Daikin continued to be very engaged during the whole project, supporting the users’ guidelines and organizing internal test sessions. That positive attitude no doubt helped us complete the project to everyone’s satisfaction.

The Google-like experience

Early on we heard from Daikin that they desired a Google-like experience from the portal. In essence, the portal needed to be one big search engine in which users search for different types of things. One customer might be looking for photo assets to enliven a catalogue, while another could be looking for technical support information to help out a client. All of them should be able to access the information they are looking for easily and quickly.

During the functional analysis, several types of usage scenarios were identified, which led us to develop different types of search engines:

  • software finder
  • asset finder
  • site search
  • news finder
  • campaign finder

A personalized interface for each user

The main challenge would turn out to be building a search functionality that could handle the diversity of information and products and return results rapidly. It was complicated by the fact that Daikin wanted one portal for all its customers. That meant building a user system to filter out irrelevant information for that specific customer. For example, when a Dutch user searches for a specific type of product, he could get different results compared to a search executed by a German user. That happens not only due to the language specificities but also due to product’s lifecycle differences across Europe: products may be discontinued in one region but still available in another. Likewise, information is customized to the users’ profile or role. An onsite installer will probably look for self-tutorials or technical product manuals, while resellers will most probably search for product portfolios or product news. To make sure information was complete and always up-to-date, AmeXio built an interface with Daikin’s SAP database that allows all the product related data to be automatically synchronized in the Adobe Experience Manager back office. This information is then combined with the related supporting assets (e.g. visuals, pictures or even related documents) and presented through the portal as a single unified content. This ensures efficiency and faster time-to-market with minimum manual intervention.

Another important part of this project, also closely linked to the personalization part, is the user management and user’s insights. Each user of the portal has his own profile, which he can link to certain market expertise or functional area. Users can also engage with certain content and give personal feedback (such as liking, commenting, etc.). All this information is then used to increase the criteria for personalization and ensure the visibility of the right content, adjusted to that specific user.

The challenge: connect and engage Daikin sales
force, affiliates, dealers, installers and customers by building a new user centric portal aimed to inspire, instruct, inform and involve them

Result

Through this project Daikin was able to succeed from a scattered and multichannel digital approach to a unique user-centric and personalized global portal. The new portal excelled the user expectations with its modern, multi-device look-and-feel and most importantly, due to its multiple functionalities and self-service tools.

From a content management perspective, the new portal finally allowed Daikin to have a consolidated overview of all their available content. It also upgraded the content creation and publishing workflows. In the new Adobe Experience Manager based portal, information is centralized from any source, which allows format consistency and the reuse of content in different contexts.

And the centralized management of information doesn’t mean that there isn’t any flexibility for local or departmental initiatives.

With the new portal, Daikin is able to strengthen trust with all existing and potential new customers, partners and employees. By providing interesting information and allowing effective communication, Daikin is ultimately leading to an increased revenue, optimized workflows, cost reduction, better customer service and improved productivity.

A centralized, user-centric global portal

  • Highly personalized information
  • Improved usability (backend and frontend)
  • Enhanced localization features
  • Complementary collaboration tools
  • Cross platform integration (SAP)
  • Multiformat and multilingual content

25

languages

35,000

registered users

55,000

documents

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