Siemens

Customer Overview

Siemens is a German multinational technology and industrial manufacturing company, serving customers across a broad range of industries. Its extensive portfolio of industrial products and systems generates substantial volumes of technical documentation, product information and support resources.

Supporting customers, partners and a workforce of 200,000 employees requires reliable access to information covering hundreds of active and discontinued products. Siemens needed to make this technical content easy to find, accurate and accessible at scale, while reducing the burden on its customer support teams.

Challenges

Siemens needed a search solution capable of providing customers, partners and employees with seamless access to technical documentation across hundreds of active and discontinued products.

The scale of the challenge was significant. Parts specifications, product information, manuals and other technical resources were distributed across more than 20 million pieces of content. Users needed to find relevant, authoritative information quickly, regardless of the product or service they were researching.

Traditional approaches to information retrieval made it difficult to provide consistent answers at this scale. Siemens wanted to improve the customer experience through self-service while reducing the operational workload and costs associated with support requests.

Solutions

Following a careful evaluation and a successful proof of concept, Siemens selected Sinequa by Argonos to provide the AI-powered search capabilities behind its Siemens Industry Online Support (SIOS) self-service portal.

The Siemens Industry Online Support portal provides a single access point where customers can search a wide range of product and service information and retrieve relevant answers from officially recognized Siemens sources.

By connecting users with authoritative technical documentation, the solution helps customers find the information they need without relying on direct assistance from support agents. This supports more efficient troubleshooting, product maintenance and access to service information.

Sinequa by Argonos provides the scalable search foundation required to handle large volumes of technical content and customer queries while supporting Siemens’ self-service strategy.

Results

Siemens has improved its customer support operations by enabling more customers to find relevant information independently through the SIOS portal.

More than 200 million self-service queries per year

Powered by Sinequa by Argonos, the SIOS portal supports more than 200 million customer self-service queries annually, giving users access to product and service information at scale.

Reduced support costs

As more customers find answers through self-service, calls to support agents have decreased and customer satisfaction has improved. Siemens estimates that without SIOS, it would have needed an additional 16 call centers and more support personnel.

The company estimates this represents a conservative saving of $1.9 million.

Faster access to information

By making relevant technical information easier to find, Siemens has also improved how efficiently customers and employees access and use the company’s expertise.

In their words

“If Siemens only knew what Siemens knows; that was the initial challenge… now our customers and employees find insight more efficiently – we’re 30% faster with Sinequa.”

Dr. Thomas Lackner
CTO Office – Corporate Technology, Siemens

The value of AI-powered search for manufacturing support

Maintenance and support have become essential to manufacturing performance and customer satisfaction. Service center technicians, field support engineers and product specialists need fast access to reliable technical information to investigate issues, diagnose problems, carry out repairs and provide timely assistance.

AI-powered enterprise search helps teams retrieve relevant information from service manuals, product documentation and other technical sources, reducing time spent searching and enabling more effective support operations.

According to estimates from CIMdata, AI-powered search solutions for maintenance and support teams can deliver the following potential improvements:

• 5–20% improvement in customer productivity: Semantic search across service manuals helps reduce equipment maintenance and repair time.
• 10–30% improvement in internal productivity: Contextualized access to customer, service and product information reduces time spent searching for answers.
• 10–25% optimization of internal resources: Greater efficiency can reduce the resources required for field service, technical support and support centers.
• 5–10% improvement in customer satisfaction and loyalty: Faster troubleshooting and reduced equipment downtime can improve the customer experience.