Adobe solutions for sustainable building technology.

The path to smart buildings

Fighting climate change and meeting the 1.5 degrees target are the key challenges of our time and have increased the demand for energy-efficient solutions and new forms of green energy. And this is exactly where Techem, a company committed to making buildings climate neutral, comes in. Techem is a leading service partner for smart and sustainable buildings with over 70 years of experience on the market. The company helps increase efficiency along a building’s entire heat and water value creation chain. As a market leader in the remote monitoring of energy consumption in residential properties, Techem helps develop networking and digital processes in buildings. Its solutions portfolio for the housing industry also includes state-of-the-art wireless smoke detectors with remote inspection and services aimed at improving the quality of drinking water in buildings. Energy efficiency and decarbonisation lie at the heart of Techem’s corporate philosophy and mission. The company is also committed to developing efficient and increasingly digitalised building technology, which, with the involvement of customers and tenants, effectively reduces energy consumption and CO₂ emissions for heat and water.

Making all services visible

With a strong B2B approach and numerous large companies among its customers, promoting its wide range of services is a key priority for Techem. Its most popular service among its 12 million customers is the heating costs calculator but the company’s portfolio also includes various other products and services, many of them digital. For example, the provision of consumption information throughout the year creates transparency about individual monthly consumption, helping to optimise user behaviour and reduce both energy and costs – in line with our motto: measurement is power. Techem’s services also include the installation and maintenance of smoke detectors and the treatment of drinking water. In order to manage these services across all 19 heterogeneous markets – including Europe, Asia and South America – in 2020 Techem decided to implement Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. As a result, Techem can now tailor its customer experiences across all touchpoints and deliver them at the right time. The Adobe Experience Cloud solutions offer a digitally scalable foundation on which lean processes can be used to manage all markets across countries from the company’s headquarters in Eschborn. In the past, different experiences were not harmonised, which prevented the company from providing a seamless customer journey and using personal data efficiently. Just six months after the integration, Techem saw both a 30 per cent increase in visitor numbers and an impressive 45 per cent increase in lead generation thanks to Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. In this context, Daniel André Groh, Techem’s Head of Digital Marketing & Communication, also likes to talk about a shift from ‘boring to boring’ to ‘special interest’. “These days, people aren’t interested in products, but in issues such as reducing CO₂ emissions and above all: how can I save? And this is where digital marketing has taken on a whole new role.”

Speed is key

Techem uses Adobe Target to find out more about its customers’ behaviour and desires. Extensive A/B testing helps obtain the insights needed to provide customised experiences in real time and to support customers at the right point. By using Adobe Analytics, Techem can combine existing data from every point of the customer journey and use the tool’s findings to produce a complete profile for each customer. All of this has allowed the company to make an international roll-out an average of 2.8 times faster than before and enabled a new market to be opened up in just six months instead of 18. This gives Techem more time to concentrate efficiently on content development and management, an advantage that also emerged as a key market benefit during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the scaling support services enabled the company to respond to pandemic-related market changes with comparatively little effort.

Communicating knowledge to create change

Eight months later, Techem also decided to use Adobe Marketo Engage to ensure it was perfectly positioned to meet all its customers’ requirements. This allowed the company to take its marketing automation to the next level. Thanks to insights into comprehensive customer behaviour data with the help of AI, Techem can now offer even more detailed customer journeys. For example, an experience can be consolidated across all touchpoints – whether web or phone – and harmonised in order to create a standardised experience and close all the gaps in the communication process. Queries relating to energy saving in particular have increased in recent months as a result of economic developments. “For us, it’s about communicating what can be achieved even on a small budget. With our measuring technology and better adjusted systems, we can show people what they are consuming and how they could save up to 10 per cent on their energy costs. At 12 million homes worldwide, that adds up to quite a lot,” says Groh. Groh also wants to improve the appeal of property again, with Adobe solutions providing particular support in the communication processes and possible investment decisions: “Adobe’s cloud solutions help us with customisation and allow us to measure whether our communications are resonating well with customers.”

The next challenge

These days, almost everyone is concerned about their heating costs and looking for solutions to economise as much as possible. Techem has noticed this in the increased numbers of incoming calls in particular. With around twelve million German households, Techem can no longer offer a level of support that meets its own corporate standards by manual means. Techem is therefore using digital solutions to create new opportunities to integrate targeted, high-performance assistance services. In future, additional Adobe solutions will be used to deal with customer concerns digitally – with the help of automated support processes, the caller rate could be reduced by at least 10 per cent.

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