Weber Keeps its Word

With its high-end products, Weber has turned the grill into a lifestyle product. “We work with a sophisticated clientèle that is prepared to pay up to €4,000 for a gas grill. Maximum flexibility and reliability in customer service is indispensable in that,” says Hans-Jürgen Herr, Weber’s EMEA President. The venerable company’s unique selling proposition: a quality guarantee born of almost a century of grilling experience. When that promise started looking a bit shaky, Weber called in the Porsche consultants.

The specialists at Porsche Consulting were commissioned to develop a customized manual for improved customer service, specifically devised for Weber and all of its use cases in the European market. The grill manufacturer was keen to make its processes between customers, retail partners and the company more effective. This was achieved through the new concept and IT system, which intelligently connects Weber employees in the different locations and enables them to work together in customer service – in a digitized and customer-friendly manner.

In less than two months, Porsche Consulting and Weber created a new system to react more quickly to customer queries – and one that can be implemented uniformly throughout Europe. "Our new concept has enabled us to shorten response times to customer queries by 90 percent. Customers used to have to wait more than two weeks at the start of the barbecue season for a response and replacement parts, but we now solve every query within two days at most—with the same level of quality,” says Hans-Jürgen Herr.