FREITAG is known for its unique bags, which come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Each bag is truly unique, made from truck tarpaulins. The upcycled material always varies in colour and design, and the range now includes over 60 bags, rucksacks, and 50 accessories, which are sold through 300 sales partners and 31 F-Stores worldwide as well as the FREITAG online store. FREITAG is a pioneer – and not just when it comes to the circular economy: since 2016, the founding brothers Markus and Daniel Freitag have favoured a holocratic company structure. This means that management responsibility no longer lies with individuals, but is distributed across the entire team (organized in so-called circles). This autonomous way of working also helps Katharina Hornschuch, CRM & Analytics Product Owner at FREITAG, to implement her Salesforce projects: „This clear division of roles means that everyone knows exactly what they are responsible for. Not only for the implementation, but also for the budget, because our employees have much more personal responsibility.” For Laura Rizzo, the Customer Relations Circle (CRC) circle lead responsible for both commerce and customer relations, the goal is to optimise the customer experience at every point of contact.
Our trailblazer Laura Rizzo on…
… extreme efficiency gains
“We carried out an assessment and spoke to all the relevant stakeholders to find out what we could do with Salesforce. One of the things that came out of that was the introduction of the Commerce Cloud. Its implementation has enabled us to make many of our B2B processes more efficient. Among other things, it has freed up resources in the back office to be used profitably in other areas. We have set up an online shop for our wholesale partners. The 24/7 availability of the many options on the new platform not only allows our wholesale customers to place orders at any time, regardless of our sales staff’s working hours. They can also access all information in one place and use numerous self-services, such as registering returns, opening support tickets, accessing invoices and credit notes with a single click, or viewing a list of their open items.”
…award-winning customer service
We did an internal reorganisation. Previously, each Sales Ambassador in our most important markets had an assistant in the back office who was only responsible for them and their wholesale customers. When we introduced the Customer Relations Circle, we needed a central platform that would truly digitalise our wholesale partners and automatically transfer their needs and orders to our ERP system. In addition to avoiding errors and digitising the entire process, our core objective was also to reduce the workload of the Customer Relations Circle team. Our customer service team consists of just six employees and now looks after all B2B and B2C customers centrally. Since the implementation of the project, the CRC team has received all enquiries, regardless of the channel, in Salesforce, which has led to greater visibility within the team. This makes collaboration and task sharing much easier, as all information can be found in one place. The use of the new services has been overwhelming: within a year, we have managed to connect Switzerland and Europe, digitising around 90 per cent of all wholesale orders and automatically integrating them into the ERP system. Customer satisfaction is also very high; we have just been recognised as one of the companies with the best customer support in Switzerland. We are very proud to be able to make an important contribution to FREITAG’s success with the CRC team.”
Our trailblazer Katharina Hornschuch on …
… personalised email marketing
“The introduction of the Marketing Cloud was our biggest project. After the assessment, we quickly realised that we needed personalised email marketing. We wanted to better segment and analyse our target group in order to know exactly who our B2B and B2C customers actually are. Now we can automatically integrate the contacts and also track the results of our marketing mailings. Salesforce is an extremely flexible tool. Our employees are increasingly realising this and want to implement more and more with Salesforce.”
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