Siegwerk launches customer portal in India

According to Siegwerk, the customer portal will be accessible 24 hours for 365 days to ensure a seamless order management service to customers.

Ashish Pradhan, president – India and Greater China, Siegwerk, said, “The customer portal is a crucial part of our digital strategy. We, at Siegwerk, have not only adopted digitalisation as a core element of our strategy but also taken steps to digitise our customer strategy. Digitising our customer strategy is to bring our customer into our day to day digital operations, digitising the order processing interface which will lead to ease of operation, enhancement of transaction speed and real-time data on the status of orders. The customer portal is a step in this direction. Siegwerk is the first ink company in India to take this big step towards customer delight.”

ITC PSPD’s Sanjay Singh and SN Venkataraman were the chief and the special guests at the launch, respectively. The session’s host was Siegwerk’s Ashesh Mukherjee, who shared the key functionalities of the customer portal and how it provides convenience and efficiency in the supply chain.

Sanjay Singh, divisional CEO, ITC PSPD, said, “About a year back, we had developed a digital platform to help farmers in their plantations and facilitate payments. The approach was to integrate the entire operation right from the farmers to the customer’s end, which yielded its fruits, especially during this Covid-19-induced lockdown period. Another digital project of ours that proved to be fruitful during the pandemic was our data integrated approach towards industry 4.0, which enabled us to improve efficiencies, reduce cost and improve the quality of the product.”

SN Venkataraman, divisional head marketing, ITC PSPD explained about the benefits of a consumer portal and how ITC has been using digital technology to strategically transform its businesses.

In an earlier conversation with PrintWeek, Pradhan explained that digitalisation is a megatrend and the Covid-19 situation has ensured that this trend has picked up the pace and it shall accelerate even more in the future. And Siegwerk’s customer portal initiative to provide an eCommerce experience to its customers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic has brought a new normal across several industries including printing inks.

Siegwerk first launched a customer portal in Germany in 2018 and implemented it in China in 2019. Followed by a pilot in India initiated on 15 July 2020. The successful Germany and China models will enable Siegwerk India's customer portal to deliver a quality user interface, good customer experience and reduce the dependency on manual procedures while ensuring visibility for the customers to efficiently manage their supply chain claims the company.

The portal is compatible on a range of devices including mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops, and offers a real-time order tracking facility that includes the order status and history. It also checks the expected delivery date while generating reports for account receivables and ageing reports, among other features.

In addition, the portal sends automated system generated notifications to customers on the progress of orders and provides purchase insights by numbers, product. It also provides a document management option through which consumers can get the technical datasheets and statement of composition.

Looking at the growing popularity of this platform, Siegwerk plans to further launch customer portals in Turkey, Netherlands, USA, France, and Malaysia in the year 2020 itself.