Empowering excellence: Sonepar leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 to offer the best omnichannel experience

As the world is shifting to greener sources of energy, Sonepar supplies businesses with the means to their end. The company’s ambition is to differentiate through stellar associate and customers experiences. As the first electrical product supplier that launched a Green Offer to promote best-in-class sustainability, the need to adapt is even greater to “remain the world leader in both an industry that is digitalizing and in a world that is electrifying,” says Jérémie Profeta, Chief Transformation Officer.

To do so, Sonepar invests €1 billion in its digital transformation on a five-year plan and trusted Microsoft technologies and partners ecosystem.

An omnichannel platform for a customer-centric experience and employees powered by digital tools

In moving towards an omnichannel experience in the B2B sector, Sonepar developed Spark, a platform powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 to ensure that the employees connecting with the businesses can provide them with seamless journey and the same level of service as in the consumer world.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Sales and Service were implemented into this unified platform so that “every customer segment benefit from a tailored value proposition,” explains Jérémie Profeta.

For the associates present in 40 countries around the world, the interconnection of Microsoft solutions personalized for their specific uses enables them to work as one team with a structured business process flow to provide the highest level of service.

"This allows us to have a complete and integrated experience for all our marketing and sales staff,” says Denis Ravel, Group Omnichannel CRM Director. "It has also enabled us to standardize our sales processes, taking the best from each franchise,” he adds.

Dynamics 365 Customer Insights empowers the marketing team, particularly in digital marketing, to deliver personalized communications whether as one-time messages or through automated customer journeys, enhancing overall efficiency. Global and local marketers delivered high engagement, evidenced by a 41% email open rate on average over the 1 million contacts who entered personalized customer journeys - so far.

Meanwhile, Dynamics 365 Sales enables field sales representatives to optimize the time and performance of their customer visits, while always having all the customer information at their fingertips.

One of the key differentiators identified by Sonepar is the interconnection of the Microsoft solutions which allows seamless data and interaction transfer from marketing to sales.

“We have a variety of customers. Digital visibility powered by Microsoft enables Sonepar to deliver a personalized omnichannel experience to every one of our customers,” summarizes Jérémie Profeta, pointing out the wide range of Sonepar’s customer base with nearly one million clients for whom 100,000 products are available.

Finally, the inside sales department uses Dynamics 365 Service to manage commercial activities and after-sales processes like onboarding new customers, qualifying and following up quotes and soon handling complaints and returns efficiently.

A successful collaboration with Hitachi Solutions and Publicis Sapient

Spark users are giving positive feedback with high adoption of the platform by the associates. Weekly usage of the platform is reported by 90% of its users.

With this platform “we are able to transfer data regarding customer needs and requests between teams, measure the service provided to our customers and the time taken to resolve problems,” says Denis Ravel.

To create the Sonepar Digital Factory, now over 300 people, Sonepar partnered with Publicis Sapient and Hitachi Solutions which supported the design and deployment of the platform.

“We chose Hitachi Solutions for its ability - like all our partners - to work on an international scale, its knowledge and experience of Dynamics 365 projects,” says Fabrice del Aguila, Senior Vice President Digital Factory

“Between Hitachi Solutions and Publicis Sapient, there is also extremely strong cooperation, their teams work together on a daily basis, which makes a clear difference,” he adds.

A resilient data lake powered by Microsoft Azure

Digitalization means that more and more data are captured on customer journeys and product usage. With over 32 billion in global revenues and 30% of sales online in 2022, Sonepar implemented a data lake. “We now have 95% of our revenues into the data lake, which means that we have visibility on the transactions, on the customer, on the product, on the channels, on the manufacturers, and we benchmark everywhere in the world,” Jérémie Profeta.

To manage these data, which are a strategic asset, Sonepar needed a hyperscaler and they chose Azure Cloud for its resiliency and its speed. “Business is a high-frequency retaining, and we really need to be sure about the resiliency and the hyper scalability of the services,” says Fabrice del Aguila “Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is critical for the developing team of the digital factory.” Throughout the deployment process, Sonepar chose to get the support of Microsoft Unified which offers a tailored and proactive approach to the implementation of the different solutions.

Artificial Intelligence: a bet to go further in the pursuit of quality and sustainability 

Sonepar aims for 100% adoption of the platform in countries where it operates in the next three to five years. To take the transformation process a step further, the company bet on Generative AI to keep delivering over-the-top omnichannel experience to both customers and associates.

Sonepar expects AI-powered technology like Microsoft GitHub Copilot to boost efficiency and velocity of its digital factory developers. Generative AI is also a game changer in optimizing product recommendation – to match customers’ expectations as well as identify available products or most sustainable references. The company is betting on Microsoft's expertise in innovation to deliver its vision.

“Our objective is to successfully complete Sonepar’s transformation and, as a world leader, transform the industry.” concludes Jérémie Profeta.