Complete Visit Reports, Finished on the Road.

SONAX is one of the leading and best-known brands in the car care segment. The company behind it is a global manufacturer of car care products and chemical cleaners, the market leader in Germany and Austria, and present in more than 100 countries worldwide.

In Germany, 58 field workers manage more than 20,000 customers, including petrol stations with car washes, vehicle preparation specialists, wholesalers for automotive accessories, DIY stores, discounters, and industrial customers. Visits range from weekly to once a year and each customer segment has different reporting requirements. for visit reports.

As executive assistant to the head of sales, Florian Behmer acts as the central link between back office and field sales and successfully introduced snapAddy VisitReport at SONAX.

For years, visit reports were a bottleneck at SONAX. Field workers entered them in the CRM at home, on a desktop, after nine or ten hours on the road. The outcome was predictable: a single line saying 'everything ok.'

In 2020, SONAX originally introduced VisitReport for lead capture at trade shows. But when COVID shut down trade shows for almost two years, Florian Behmer and his team used the downtime to roll out VisitReport for field sales instead. After just eight weeks, the first digital visit report went live.

Since then, the tool has become an integral part of the daily work of the 58 field workers – with impressive results: 2,500 reports per month and more than 100,000 reports created in total.

The content of the visit reports varies by team and customer and covers a wide range of relevant information:

• Topics discussed and agreed follow-up actions to plan the next steps.
• Details on contact persons and visit duration as input for territory and capacity planning
• Revenues allocated to wholesalers to prepare annual reviews on a solid basis
• Information on accompanying colleagues and cross-team training sessions
• Documentation of the equipment status for the car wash teams, including maintenance of pumps, dryers, and bay cleanliness, which is reported back to the oil company as owner of the facilities

Thanks to dependent questions, the user interface adapts in an individualized way so that each field worker only sees the fields relevant to their team.

Structured data and free text complement each other perfectly: Clearly defined information is captured in the corresponding CRM fields, while qualitative content can be formulated freely. As a result, the report reaches the CRM system with a level of depth that was previously impossible – it no longer only includes information about the visit itself, but also about the topics discussed and the next steps.

The integration of snapAddy VisitReport with portatour, the route planning tool used at SONAX, is a good example of how seamlessly the tool works with existing systems: The field worker starts the report directly from their daily route, with the correct customer automatically preselected. With more than 50,000 contacts in the CRM system, this prevents a common error: assigning a contact person with the same name to the wrong company.

In addition, VisitReport offers comparable integrations, for example with Outlook, and fits smoothly into the established workflows of the team.

The core of VisitReport is the Voice AI function: instead of painstakingly typing out the visit, field workers can dictate most of their reports. The system not only transcribes the content, it also automatically assigns it to the corresponding report fields. This means the report is ideally created immediately after the customer visit, for example in the parking lot, and not hours later at the desk.

In day-to-day work at SONAX, this delivers a number of benefits:

• More time with customers, less on admin: The workday ends with the final visit, not with tedious documentation in the evening.

• Higher data quality with less effort: Reports are created immediately after the appointment – complete, accurate, and ready to use.

• Solid ground for planning and decisions: Comprehensive, detailed reports from the entire team replace the old standard entry of “everything ok.”

Two key capabilities make Voice AI especially productive for SONAX’s nationwide field sales organization:

• Dialect understanding out of the box: Whether Bavarian, Franconian, Saxon, or colleagues with German as a second language – Voice AI understands them reliably and accurately.
• Automatic learning instead of manual training: Through everyday use, the tool dynamically adapts to the team’s language without needing glossaries or special vocabularies to be set up. Florian Behmer sums it up: “We don’t need that – it works great as it is.”

Rolling out a solution is one thing – embedding it successfully in an experienced field sales team is a very different challenge. At SONAX, the average age of field workers is around 50. Florian Behmer is very familiar with the typical reactions and habits in such teams.

SONAX began introducing VisitReport with a clear goal: at least half of all reports were to be created with the tool going forward. This target was quickly exceeded – thanks in no small part to the tool’s capabilities.

The real driver of adoption was the Voice AI function in VisitReport, which allows field workers to dictate their report instead of typing it in manually. This feature in particular dispelled the initial reservations in the team – for a simple reason:

Once you’ve experienced dictating the report comfortably in the parking lot instead of typing it up laboriously in the evening, you don’t want to go back – not even the colleagues who were skeptical at first. Thorsten Ewe describes what this relief looks like in the everyday life of a field worker:

Today, the entire team actively uses the solution: The reports have now reached a level of quality that enables SONAX to use them as a reliable basis for territory planning, annual reviews, and strategic decisions.

After six years of successful collaboration with snapAddy and more than 100,000 visit reports created, one thing is clear for Florian Behmer: