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VIAFON – Understanding, selling, refining
VIAFON is the market-leading dialog agency in Germany. For over 25 years, the team around Alexander Nathansohn has been communicating on behalf of B2B customers throughout Europe.
For well-known clients such as Google, ImmobilienScout, METRO and Heise Verlag, millions of successful customer dialogs are conducted via telephone, qualified and refined into a lasting customer relationship. In short, the VIAFON team has made many well-known companies famous, successful and big.
Customer dialog is dead. Long live customer dialog.
In 2017, VIAFON was in the process of digitalization. Manual workflows that had been in place for years were transferred to digital and automated IT systems. The move to the private cloud was also successfully mastered.
However, this did not take into account the fundamental mindset of the new generation, the changing work and media usage behavior of employees and customers, or the reflection of the company’s own business model.
According to the motto “People will still be making phone calls in 25 years, it’s all about dialog between people.” the management assumed that digitizing the old processes would be enough to remain successful on the market.
However, projects such as Google Duplex, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are already showing us new and alternative ways to enter into dialog with brands and products. After 25 years of successful telephony, the world has become faster, more dynamic and more complex. Customer requirements continue to rise, but budgets are not.
In Berlin – Germany – the tried-and-tested method of simply overwhelming large-volume customer inquiries for dialog communication with massive manpower is simply no longer economical under reasonable wage and working conditions. Nowadays, customer dialogs are won on the right channel, in the right target group and with a tailor-made message. It is no longer possible for a person to unravel all this in their head and by hand. Intelligence, cleverness, functioning processes and a good dose of creativity are necessary to win this new game.
Identify concrete measures with the VIAFON team, align them strategically and implement them in order to remain the number one in customer dialog for the next 25 years.
In a variety of workshops, interviews and employee and customer surveys, the requirements, challenges and needs for the “customer dialog of the future” service as well as the working conditions of a modern dialog agency were determined.
From the more than 280 ideas identified, over 28 project proposals were clustered in a joint and transparent evaluation process. In an initial transformation phase, 12 selected projects were then launched. The rest of the ideas are in the backlog ready to be called up until resources are available again.
The first successes were visible and tangible after just a few weeks. Work was carried out centrally, digitally and live in cloud-based software at all times, which alone was new territory and quickly became “state of the art” at VIAFON. At a monthly project jour fixe, everyone was able to find out the current project status and give direct feedback. The fact that this could also be very critical was unusual at first, but is now part of the feedback culture.
The projects we worked on included, for example: the use of artificial intelligence in automated speech analysis for customer satisfaction, automatic pattern recognition of lead quality from delivered data, the visualization of key performance indicators in real time & the improvement of the employee onboarding process. In addition, a new position of Chief Digital Officer including a work department was created.
With the help of this new position created at management level, the fundamental intellectual DNA of VIAFON was changed at all levels. Despite 25 years of professional experience, the historically grown team acquired working methods, mindsets, technologies and skills that are actually only found in fast-growing and dynamic start-ups.
The first MVPs, customer journeys, Kanban meetings, vialabs and sprint planning were the result. The change was and is noticeable when you walk down the long corridors at VIAFON. However, the in-house VIAFON spirit was not lost in the process.
VIAFON already offers its own software solution for measuring the quality of customer dialogs. This was unthinkable before 2018. In addition, the business development team is actively working on the future of dialog marketing of the future. VIAFON is the proactive driver and shaper on the market and not the reactive imitator. This is exactly what has changed, confirms Managing Director Alexander Nathansohn.
Along with this highly strategic yet agile and project-oriented approach, VIAFON has managed to adapt its corporate culture and the associated business model to changing conditions in the long term.
Alexander Nathansohn says:
It’s time to invest in the future
What we have achieved in concrete terms
By teaching proven working practices in idea sourcing, digital project management, team communication and the use of digital tools with the right cultural guidelines, we were able to empower 18 VIAFON team members to transform ideas into concrete results in a targeted, stringent and efficient manner.
Teamhero was also able to successfully recruit and fill the vacant position of Chief Digital Officer from a pool of top international applicants. A joint onboarding process helped to combine the old DNA with the new one and thus implement the transformation sustainably.
Specifically, we were able to convey the following content:
The entire Teamhero team would like to thank the VIAFON team for the trustful cooperation. In particular, we would like to thank the shareholder Anne Stahl-Weiß, the managing director appointed at the time, Doreen Krause, and the managing director Alexander Nathansohn. Only because you dared to ask the right questions did you lay the foundation for VIAFON to continue to exist for the next 25 years. We thank you for your trust in us.
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