Hörmann uses AI to make sales visits more customer-centric

As one of the world’s leading suppliers of doors and other building products, Germany’s Hörmann Group is constantly trying to improve business interactions and customer experience (CX) by unifying marketing activities, sales, repair, and maintenance services.

Recognizing an opportunity for progress, Hörmann has revolutionized its field technology, much to the delight of its sales force. For example, after visiting multiple customers daily, reps often waited until the end of the week to compile reports of each interaction.

Although report-generating was essential for Hörmann’s customer centricity, sales reps were said frustrated by the time-consuming process. Plus, the fact that the reports weren’t composed for several days meant that information was forgotten in the interim, leading to incomplete submissions.

Looking for that high-tech cure

These predicaments surfaced during a crisis in the German construction industry, which was caused by rising costs, stricter regulations, shortages of skilled labor and raw materials, and pressures related to integrating digital technology, among other factors.  

During the best and worst of times, businesses can only move forward by maintaining and supporting positive relationships with customers—an objective that would be best achieved if Hörmann had a quick, easy tool for recording visit reports as soon as each customer meeting ended.

As Hörmann consistently seeks to leapfrog innovation, the company proactively laid the groundwork for developing an AI-powered “visit report assistant,” setting the stage to capture the building products industry’s attention and drive forward its transformative potential.

Changing the face of customer relationships

From its headquarters in Steinhagen, Hörmann has sold more than 20 million doors since 1935, operating an enterprise that employs more than 6,000 staffers in over 40 factories in Europe, North America, and Asia.  Sales locations can be found in some 40 countries, while sales partnerships have been established in 50 more.

Working with multinational software leader SAP,  Hörmann has been using the company’s SAP Customer Experience solutions since 2018. However, by the early part of this decade, the traditional SAP Sales and Service Cloud mobile app could only provide simple speech recognition while transcribing the audio from visit reports.

But SAP already had the technology to expand the app’s capabilities via its SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), a suite of solutions designed to integrate, automate, extend, and build AI-powered innovations. For Hörmann, those options would now be activated to create the new visit report assistant.

Upon concluding a meeting, a representative could casually narrate each detail while walking back to the car or transit station, keeping the most important points of the exchange. The solution would “secure all relevant data…directly after the visit with a minimum of time investment,” noted Hörmann’s head of Department Central Customer and Service Applications, Lennard Eichler.

More importantly, the tool would produce a concise, real-time summary of the proceedings in a standardized, easy-to-comprehend format, using AI Whisper to accurately transcribe audio recordings and a Large Language Model (LLM) to ensure that all spellings and terminology are correct.  Each report could then be swiftly handed over to customers, enabling all parties to work from the same point of departure.

From frustration to efficiency for sales reps and customers

Deployed in January 2025, the visit report assistant eliminated tedious copy-and-paste tasks, freeing employees from laborious writing sessions, and giving them more time for value-adding activities and reducing demotivation. The seamless flow of data allows each sales team to have the most updated information at its disposal, summarizing the text with keywords that can be scanned for a quick overview of the visit.

Today, the time required for documentation has dropped by 83 percent, as sales reps can compose a visit report in five minutes, as opposed to 30 minutes before the implementation. All told, sales reps have already saved more than 5,220 hours on tasks related to assembling the data.

Internally, employee satisfaction has shot up, as reps describe a reporting process that’s less burdensome while significantly more efficient. 

Driving innovation in the industry 

By developing a visit report assistant that has become the industry-leading CX standard, Hörmann was distinguished as a winner at the 2025 SAP Innovation Awards in the “AI Excellence” category. The yearly event celebrates forward-thinking organizations harnessing SAP products and cloud technologies to flourish in an ever-changing landscape – and Hörmann is being widely recognized for spearheading this trend. 

You can learn more about what Hörmann did to earn such recognition by reading their Innovation Awards pitch deck.