On April 27th, 2017, Staffbase invited over 45 customers to our first ever User Group Meeting which was focused on the German-speaking DACH region. Paramount among our mutual goals was to share best practices and wisdom collected in the past two years with an employee app.
We were delighted to see that a group of internal communicators, HR specialists and IT heroes from all over Germany accepted our invitation. The fact that these guests came from industry-leading companies such as Audi, Deutsche Telekom, Paulaner, MAN, Viessmann, Heel, Siemens, Reinert Logistics and Breuninger once again proving, how important the topic of mobile internal communication has become.
It was so great, thank you for the amazing event.”
Markus Röhl, REINERT Logistics
We welcomed our guest at the renowned Viessmann headquarters in Allendorf near Frankfurt. The Viessmann Group was one of our first big customers and has become much of a partner during the last year. Carsten Lucaßen, Head of Digital Communications Projects at Viessmann, helped us to secure and plan the event in this pristine location. Once again “Thank You” to our great host!
The event was kicked-off by Viessmann’s CEO Joachim Janssen who then handed over to our CEO Martin Böhringer. Martin gave a presentation on employee experience, demonstrating the possibility of the Staffbase app to be the basis of an employee experience platform and sharing our vision of the future of work.
After a short coffee break, Susan Wanitschke gave the attendees exclusive insights into the T-Systems MMS app and the learnings and use case they see after one year. T-Systems is especially successful in using the app for event registration and planning. Another interesting insight was to see, that T-Systems only uses push notification between 9 and 5. Their notifications are read within an hour by 75% of the employees which is a great number and mainly reached because of the timing they have figured out.
Next, Patrick Rudolph, our Head of Product took the stage and gave an exclusive insight into the Staffbase Roadmap for 2017. Demonstrating not only who has a say in the planning but also how the development team plans out a sprint. The presentation gave a valuable insight into the processes at Staffbase, making clear that features won’t be developed within a week but that we value needs and insights our customers give us immensely.
After lunch our host Viessmann was generous enough to tour us through their HQ. The HQ was also recently visited by Angela Merkel and is the first site to have received the German Sustainability Award in 2009 and 2011 for most sustainable production and most sustainable brand in Germany, respectively, following the introduction of the company's "Efficiency Plus" campaign.
Following the tour Carsten Lucaßen gave an insight into the Vi2Go app that connects Viessmann’s 11.000 employees all over Europe. After just one year the app has had outstanding success, running in six different languages and challenging the structures of this traditional company. Especially fruitful for Viessmann was the development of an SAP time sheet plugin which now enables factory workers to check in on their data over the app and avoids long, time-intensive queuing at the HR office in their breaks.
Thanks again to the entire team for such a great first user group meeting.”
Kerstin Vietor, B. Braun
To round up the day the participants then dove into three interactive sessions. The first session was designed to exchange ideas on Engagement Drivers. Lead by Nancy Mönch, Head of IC at SPARDA Berlin and Johannes Rieger, member of the communications team at the Paulaner Brewery Group this session went into the details of how to engage the employees. Both companies have had sign-up rates that can be called nothing but impressive. Sparda having a sign-up rate of 82% after just 3 months and Paulaner having a 70% user rate.
The second session was lead by Patrick Rudolph and discussed the further roadmap and possibilities of the app. And the last session around Nadine Sohrauer from our customer success team discussed the new start-page feature which allows our customers to personalise their start-page.
Looking back at the two days we are very pleased to see that not only so many of our customers joined us for the event but also that the exchange of ideas and best practices was so productive.
We look forward to making this a regular and an international event. Thank you and until then!
Thank you again for the invitation, it was a great event, sadly too short. It was really fun and extremely interesting, especially to get insights into the development and experience of other customers who have used the app over a longer period and more extensively.”
Thomas Dirmeier, MAN Trucks & Bus AG
Read more about employee communication apps:
- Employee Communication Apps: 10 Benefits of a Mobile Comms Platform
- Employee Apps: 8 Steps for Finding the Best
- Employee Engagement Apps: 10 Decisions to Make Before You Start
- Learn more about the Staffbase Internal Communications App
- Why Companies Choose Staffbase as their Employee Communications Platform