The HOMAG Group is the world's leading supplier of integrated solutions for production in the woodworking industry and the craft sector.
As a global player, we have international production plants as well as sales and service companies. With around 7000 employees, we are present in over 100 countriesand have an estimated world market share of over 30 percent.
Our product range extends from individual machines for craft businesses to complete networked production lines for highly industrialized, individual furniture manufacturing. Numerous services in the environment of the producing machines and plants as well as the respective suitable control software make our offer unique.
Trade shows and events have played a very important role for us for years. We spend a large part of our marketing budget on them and align our development cycles with the most important international trade shows.
However, this also involves very high costs for logistics and organization. Therefore, even before the pandemic, we asked ourselves how we wanted to deal with trade shows in the future and decided to combine physical and online events.
We were unable to implement this plan with existing software tools, as they were not designed for this purpose and were very inflexible.
When, due to the pandemic, customers could no longer come to the showrooms and we had to cancel our in-house exhibition, it was clear to us that we had to make greater use of online events. We have now equipped ourselves very well technically for this and organize dedicated online events four to six weeks before the traditional product launches to get even more customers excited about our products.
As a large corporation with almost 17,000 employees, the topic of IT security was extremely important to us.
Internally, only tools from the Microsoft environment are used. The requirement is to organize events that are controlled by a professional director.
The Microsoft standard tools such as Teams are only conditionally suitable for a complete handling of an online event. It must be ensured that the event tool can adapt to the content and that the script does not have to adapt due to restrictions.
The IT security and data protection departments have the final say in our case. The requirement for us was that the tool must be based on Microsoft Teams or a Microsoft infrastructure and the data must be hosted in Europe.
The fact that STREAMBOXY has Microsoft integration puts a smile on our IT's face. It is also important for event preparation and follow-up that there is a connection to the CRM.
STREAMBOXY then quickly worked with Salesforce on an integration. Within six weeks, the platform was implemented into the existing environment.
It was clear to us that we needed a landing page on the frontend that was branded in our CI, as well as an event platform on the backend that was connected to it.
Customers look there for events, can register there and view past events. Once they register there, the data is passed to the CRM.
The events are created automatically on the landing page and we can design everything ourselves and flexibly perform test runs before the events without having to rely on external service providers.
Our event portal live.homag.com is also multilingual and has numerous filters and categories through which the user can display specific events.
We have our own control room in the webcast studio to be able to produce very high quality events. With STREAMBOXY, we can present the screen or play videos without being noticed.
"It gives the customer a very good user experience - almost like watching Netflix." Together with Salesforce, a phased integration was implemented. The CRM has already been connected, and in the future there will also be integrated lead qualification.
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"It gives the customer a very good user experience - almost like watching Netflix."
We initially acquired our own webcast studio, including a greenwall. From there, we stream our online events and host Q&A sessions.
We often also use pre-recorded videos from our machines for our events, which we can play in during the livestreams. In some cases, we also switch to other sources via STREAMBOXY.
All these functionalities were not possible with the other tools. The fact that participants can log in quickly and easily via the browser is also a great advantage. From experience, there are always technical problems with tools that could not map this in this way. We have created a new position for online events that can focus on organizing the events and generating leads.
By organizing more virtual events, we were able to organize more sustainable and cost-effective events professionally.
We were able to perfect our product launches by using STREAMBOXY and significantly improve our alignment with sales.
Our online events can then be viewed on demand by users.
It would be particularly exciting for us to personalize the highlight feed based on CRM data as our next project.
STREAMBOXY has been very flexible in responding to our ideas and together we have developed a solution that is very well tailored to us.
"What we appreciate about the STREAMBOXY solution is that it can be easily and flexibly adapted to our needs and event content. This allows us to get the most out of our storytelling and inspire customers with our presentations every time."
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