Stora Enso teams up with SynGro to drive customer satisfaction

Stora Enso was previously using a time intensive manual process for collecting customer feedback. Motivated to enhance customer experience and create a competitive advantage, it implemented a state-of-the-art Enterprise Feedback Management solution from SynGro. Now Stora Enso is able to collate much greater volumes of customer feedback data, in multiple languages, whilst saving significant time and resource and enabling the organisation to implement a continual improvement process across the business.

The company


Stora Enso is a global paper, packaging and wood products company with over 27,000 employees and 88 production facilities in more than 35 countries worldwide. One of the world’s biggest producers of industrial resources, Stora Enso’s sales totalled EUR 8.9 billion in 2009. Its customers include publishers, printing houses and paper merchants, as well as the packaging, joinery and construction industries.

The situation


Stora Enso’s customer feedback programme had involved in-depth face-to-face interviews with customers in each of its geographic locations annually. It was a time intensive process and was conducted only once per year so the findings were only a snapshot in time.
The organisation was also using a bespoke system to store the data. The user interface was time consuming and complicated and the reporting options limited, making analysis difficult. Put simply, Stora Enso’s new CEO wanted to give it a fresh approach.

John McKechie, Vice President of Customer and Sales Support for Stora Enso, said: “Although historically we had invested a lot of time and effort to collect customer feedback our system wasn’t fully enterprise-wide and was not integrated to our strategic planning processes.

“We did not have a structure in place to ensure that we could use customer feedback to change or improve the way we did things. This also meant we had no formalised way of knowing whether we had ‘closed the loop’ on any issues that were being addressed by our customers, so that they were aware we had taken action on their feedback and had rectified the situation.”

The solution


Stora Enso engaged Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) specialists SynGro in 2008 to implement a real-time, multi-lingual solution that would support their new customer satisfaction and loyalty programme, VOICE (Value of Identifying Customer Expectations). EFM allows organisations to centrally manage customer feedback data, whilst enabling the deployment of information across the enterprise to provide key decision makers with important analytical data in real-time, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and retention and, ultimately, boosting profits.

Given the sheer scale of the implementation of VOICE across more than 60 countries, covering 19 different languages, it has been rolled-out in a phased, country-by country approach with the full integration of all units planned for mid-2010.

The benefits


The EFM solution has significantly simplified and streamlined Stora Enso’s customer feedback management process. It allows Stora Enso to collect, store and analyse feedback efficiently and effortlessly, from a much larger customer population. It also allows feedback to be gathered from any customer touch point via phone, email and web-based surveys. Furthermore, the sophistication of the technology means that communication with customers is carried out in their chosen language and feedback is then converted back to English for central analysis.

Underlying the SynGro concept is the ability to drive the right actions leading to the best outcomes in growing the lifetime value of an organisation’s customer base. The system includes knowledge management, action orientation and collaboration features aimed at encouraging focused engagement throughout the whole organisation to enhance customer experience. The system delivers role-based automated reports and includes a closed loop feedback management capability that allows low scores/complaints data to be sent to the person or people within the organisation who are accountable for fixing the problem. This ensures the loop is closed on all queries.

McKechie said: “Customer feedback helps us to pinpoint the key processes we need to focus on to make our customers more satisfied. As the first company in the paper and pulp industry to embark on an EFM strategy, it should create a competitive advantage allowing us to stay ahead of the field. We are already seeing the benefits of the programme through improved levels of interaction with our customers, which have increased since we first introduced the programme. In turn, we will be able to make the necessary changes to our business processes from the feedback we receive.

“SynGro offers a customisable software platform to support the processes, as well as the necessary advice to guide us through the approach of measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty in a coordinated way across the entire company. SynGro’s software is light years ahead of what we had before. It’s comprehensive, flexible and easy to use whereas other systems can be restrictive and difficult to adapt. SynGro understood what we wanted to achieve with VOICE from day one and came up with a solution that fits with our business strategy.”

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