KWS stays focused on its customers – as a one-stop shop for tackling all issues.
Holistic approach
Becoming an even more valuable seed partner
Our new holistic Customer Centricity approach brings us closer to farmers: Backed by our Product Management’s expertise, we are a one-stop shop for addressing all agricultural topics and issues.
The Customer Centricity project, which defines our future customer consulting structure, enables us to forge even closer ties, while optimizing internal processes. Because the agricultural sector is changing – and we want not only to keep pace, but also to lead the way with foresight.
Our crop-specific structures and ways of working have focused to date on individual crops and have taken us to where we are now. At the same time, however, the continuous diversification and further development of all Business Units (BUs) and crop portfolios has made our structure a growing challenge over the past few years.
“We want to meet changing customer expectations in order to offer end-to-end consulting and enable continuous growth,” explains Peter Hofmann, the Executive Board member responsible for most crops. “We therefore want to establish a customer-centric structure at KWS so as to offer customer service from a single source.”
“We want to offer customer service from a single source.”
Peter Hofmann
From crop-specific to customer-centric
We are adapting our internal structures to support this change and will further develop our market alignment from a focus on individual crops toward greater customer orientation. We are strengthening our position as a seed partner with direct access to a broad portfolio of crops and outstanding know-how.
Customer Centricity is our next logical step. It means that we act with a cross-crop approach and, wherever possible, in an even more customer-centric way by offering holistic agricultural consulting and relevant services at the same time.
In concrete terms, this means that in the future there will only be one dedicated, cross-crop contact person for each customer, who will receive support from cultivation experts where necessary. We are also gearing our sales organization toward the needs of the future: with a holistic go-to-market approach from the farmer’s perspective and with services, products and farm-specific solutions that are optimally tailored to their needs – throughout the entire farming year. Our aim is to develop new services and products that deliver benefits beyond those of a single crop.
Focus on the regional level
While we will retain our overarching Business Units at the Group and regional level, there will no longer be BU-specific country organizations. Each country will have one Head of Country responsible for all crops. They will manage the markets together with the Heads of Region at the respective BUs.
We are pursuing a tailored approach and plan to complete implementation of Customer Centricity by the end of fiscal 2025/2026. The project framework initially includes all European KWS units that do not yet have a customer-centric setup. That means a total of 17 countries will initiate the change process in 2024.
“Our sales employees are experts in agriculture, have broad-ranging knowledge and are familiar with the challenges faced by our customers,” states Peter Hofmann. “We offer them the chance to expand this knowledge even further with specific training and support services, and we provide assistance where needed.”
Successful pilot project in Poland
Customer Centricity is not new ground for us – seven countries are already working in such a setup: Belarus, Chile, Moldova, Morocco, Poland, Spain and Switzerland.
Up to now:
Based on the requirements of our company in 1992, we served customers on the basis of a BU structure geared toward individual crops.
In the future:
“One face to the customer” – we adapt to customers’ current and future needs with cross-crop offerings from a single source.
Analysis of the pilot project in Poland
We spent three years carefully analyzing the customer-centric process in Poland, our pilot market, and the results we obtained were impressive. The new structure has now been successfully implemented and is reaping the first positive economic effects. The findings and experience from that are helping us to take the right steps toward a company-wide setup.
Jarosław Wierzyk, our Sales Representative in Poland, notes: Farmers perceive the change positively – because they now have close contact with just one consultant from KWS. Our cooperation is growing quickly because I’m now responsible for several crops and I can therefore provide comprehensive advice.” |
© KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA 2025
