Success Story
Intershop uses WebEx to improve the bottom line and communicate more effectively with employees, partners and prospects around the world
Intershop is a leading provider of Unified Commerce Management software for managing e-commerce processes across the extended enterprise. Founded in 1992, Intershop has over a decade’s experience in driving innovation in e-commerce. Its software enables automation of online commerce processes across the geographical and technical borders of the enterprise.
Headquartered in Jena, Germany, and with 10 global offices from San Francisco to London to Hong Kong, Intershop’s business is built on providing world-class service and support – regardless of how or where a company's business expands.
The Challenge – saving resources while improving communications
Intershop has an extensive team of offices, consultants and implementation partners and serves customers such as HP, TRW and Otto around the world. In trying to reach employees, partners and prospects around the world, Intershop wanted to find a better way to communicate more effectively while maximizing time and resources.
According to Arne Klein, Product Manager at Intershop, costs were less of an issue during boom of the dot-com era in – a lot of travel was a standard part of business. “In the current economy,” Klein comments, “we needed an alternative to business travel that would allow us to work smarter and more efficiently whilst maintaining a solid communications network both internally and with customers and partners.”
The Solution – Intershop selects WebEx for worldwide online meetings
Intershop decided on WebEx Meeting Center to communicate with its offices worldwide to roll out strategically important projects such as roadmaps and company blueprints.
“Over the past 9 months, we’ve been spending time training staff on how to use WebEx,” says Klein. “It’s very easy to use, and we find that around 80% of our employees are confident with the service after just half an hour of training.”
The sales team in EMEA used the service to schedule “WebEx with an Expert” sessions. These online meetings are aimed at existing customers and OEM partners and contain in-depth information on specific products and issues.
“These sessions mean that we can use our expert knowledge much more efficiently, technical specialists can now communicate effectively with more geographically dispersed customers from one central location.” explains Klein. “A major benefit of WebEx is being able to reach many more people much easier.”
The Benefits – better information flow
Using WebEx Meeting Center has helped to get the right information to Intershop’s employees and partners quickly and has improved its lead generation process.
“Whereas before, we had to visit the clients to show them our software products, we can now give a brief overview via the Web,” comments Klein. “If there is a sufficient interest from the client and if our solution seems to fit their needs, we can then follow it up with a much focussed onsite meeting. In this way we filter the client visits we do, increasing the percentage of these meetings that results in a sale.” This “pre-qualification” benefit of using WebEx, saves on resources affecting the bottom line.
Not only are employees and partners getting the information they need to do business by a much quicker means, the savings are extended to meeting space and materials. Klein explains, “We have around 240 staff worldwide and using WebEx for internal training purposes saves on facilities hiring and producing materials as well as the travel cost of getting everyone in one place.”
Savings for Intershop have come not only in terms of costs but also in terms of sales productivity. One German sales consultant estimates that in one case he saved the cost of an international flight, four days activity and other expenses associated only with travel. The WebEx session took just three hours to prepare plus the presentation time itself. From 4 days to three hours is a significant savings.
Intershop has found the low infrastructure cost and time investment of setting up and hosting a WebEx meeting has significantly improved its global communication. Every department now has WebEx users, from engineering and sales, to product management and consulting.
The Future
Intershop plans to expand its use of WebEx services to its customers and partners via its website. As part of the corporate strategy, the website will allow customers worldwide to initiate a real time collaborative session with product managers – these sessions will include anything from technical queries to more in depth software workshops.
“We feel that since WebEx has transformed the way in which we communicate as a business, the next step is to allow those we want to interact with, our prospects, to really make the most of this transformation,” says Klein. “It’s likely that the recent increase in our use of the service will continue as WebEx becomes Intershop’s platform for real-time collaboration.”