[VIDEO] Digital tools at Dura-Line lead to effortless customer experience

Dec 19, 2022

sales, marketing and service
discrete manufacturing
Inriver

It started with a simple update of the website, but it ended up being much more than that. Faced with the challenge of making highly technical information easily accessible, digestible and ‘fun’, Dura-Line’s marketing department teamed up with delaware. Together, and with the help of best-in-class digital tools, they laid the groundworks for a company-wide focus on customer experience. A feat whose impact is felt way beyond the customer-facing realms of sales and marketing.

Client: Dura-Line, the world's largest manufacturer of communications duct: a unique product used to protect the fiber-optic cable in telecommunications networks
Challenge: The organization needed to make their product information more accessible and uniform across all customer touchpoints

Dura-Line (US) is the world’s largest manufacturer of communications duct. Every year, they produce about 426 million meters of fiber-optic cable, enough to circle the Earth 10 times. Among the company’s roughly 2,000 customers are end-users, engineers, installers, and distributors.

Check out the video below to hear Tanya Kanczuzewski, head of global marketing communication at Dura-Line, explain how Dura-Line’s marketing team became a driver for company-wide customer focus.

Technical information made accessible

“While every one of our customer persona’s has unique needs and expectations, they have at least one thing in common: a desire for information that helps them understand which product to choose, and how to use it,” says Tanya Kanczuzewski, Dura-Line’s head of global marketing communication. “Our role is to make this information as accessible and digestible as possible for our customers, as well as for our sales team. This includes everything from pure technical data sheets to digital tools for comparing different products and calculating ROI.”

“Initially, we thought that upgrading our website and adding a product tool for customers would suffice,” she adds. “But we quickly learned that we first had to centralize all product information and communicate uniformly across all customer touch points if we wanted to do this right. This is when we reached out to delaware, whose team came highly recommended by our sister company Netafim .”

a colleague from sales said that three customers had mentioned how amazing our digital tools are, in that week alone

Tanya Kanczuzewski, head of global marketing communication at Dura-Line

A winning combination

Together, the Dura-Line and delaware teams organized several cross-departmental workshops, involving stakeholders from sales, marketing, and operations. Based on insights from these workshops, the delaware team proposed a combination of tools to support the needs of all stakeholders – including, of course, Dura-Line’s customers:

inriver: a product information management system (PIM) to centralize all product information and enable uniform communication. inriver sends its data to the Dura-Line website automatically via an operational data store (ODS).
Optimizely: a content management system (CMS) that allows the marketing team to manage content through a single source of truth and minimizes the need to manually update every regional and language version of the Dura-Line website.
Digizuite: a digital asset management system (DAM) that enables sales to easily find the right content and product images while they’re on the road. The DAM also ensures content and images are shown correctly on the website, and gives the marketing team a lot more control over what is shown, and how.

“We started by implementing these tools in our US market,” adds Tanya. “Later, we expanded to Canada, Latin America, Europe, India and the Middle East & Africa.”

When marketing takes the lead in digital transformation

“The Dura-Line project is a textbook case of what happens when marketing takes the lead in digital transformation,” says Felix De Clercq, digital strategist at delaware. “After all, they’re in the best position to do so: they understand the customer and, hopefully, have a good relationship with other stakeholders within the company as well.”

“Many companies invest a lot of money, time, and resources to transform operational processes like supply chain, logistics, and production. When sales and customer service are involved, it’s often from a very operational perspective. The goal of digitizing sales, for examples, is often just to improve planning or management reporting.”

“It’s cases like Dura-Line that show how valuable that customer-first perspective can be for successful digital transformation. A website is a good example: while it’s often seen as the responsibility of marketing, the addition of customer portals, product information, configurators, online services and more has a real impact on operations as well. It’s always great, during workshops, to see that puzzle click into place.”

In the pipeline

For Dura-Line, centralizing all product information and content paved the way for even more ambitious initiatives to improve the customer experience and support sales. These include:

Setting up a HubSpot integration to supercharge email marketing.
Developing a customer portal for key accounts to check sales and purchase orders, and invoices (which has proved to be a tremendous help for Dura-Line’s customer service desk since everything is easily retrievable).
Creating a product configurator and an ROI calculator to allow customers to create their own Dura-Line conduit and help with their purchasing decision.
Setting up a PDF generator for brochures, saving the sales team several hours per week in preparation time.

“delaware was a key partner in making all of this happen,” says Tanya. “From the first time we met, they really listened and understood our needs. That, for me, was the biggest difference compared to other vendors. And the results are astonishing: just the other day, I got an e-mail from a colleague in sales, who told me that three of their customers had mentioned how amazing our digital tools are, in that week alone. For me, that’s a win.”