Customer Story

The Association of Local Utilities (VKU) represents the interests of the local supply and waste management industry in Germany. The approximately 1,500 member companies organised in the VKU are primarily active in energy supply, water and wastewater management, waste management and municipal cleaning as well as telecommunications. In the service of the association, VKU Service GmbH offers all communal stakeholders, online and offline, a reliable platform to work together on solutions for the challenges of the future. The products and services of VKU Service GmbH are aimed at the association's member companies.

As a legacy of a previous, partially successful Salesforce implementation, VKU Service GmbH was faced with the problem of data silos. Customer data was stored in Access, Salesforce and Drupal. EMPAUA's challenge was to improve the system integration and make event management available in Salesforce, while also integrating it with the e-commerce system.

Due to the lack of compatibility, the previous email marketing solution, Evalanche, needed to be replaced. The aim was to reduce the number of systems a staff member had to engage with to manage events and members, while improving the efficiency of the overall process.

By cleaning up the inventory data and migrating all missing customer data to Salesforce, the Access database could be retired and removed from the system architecture. At the same time, the Salesforce data model was optimised to allow event and attendee management, plus member segmentation. Campaigns were automatically created for events, to enable easy email communication.

Through an enhanced Drupal integration, events and participants are now automatically created as records in Salesforce and updated when changes are made in the Drupal shop. VKU Service GmbH made the strategic decision to move away from Evalanche and replace it with the Salesforce product Pardot. This allowed for easy integration with Salesforce, to further expand the campaigns created from the events.

Since the customer documents created by Salesforce had initially been set up with code and could not be easily maintained by VKU Service GmbH, the decision was made to move to Conga Composer for document creation.

By optimising and completing the Salesforce implementation, VKU Service GmbH can now use the power and flexibility of the Salesforce platform to offer the right events to the right members within an efficient digital sales process.

This has resulted in fewer staff steps to manage events and a more integrated system environment; and ultimately, it’s meant more bookings and a lower bounce rate during the booking process.

Moreover, the improved segmentation of customers and their interests enables VKU Service GmbH to offer a tailored, modern service to its members.