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FMCG INSIGHTS
How Julius Meinl is digitally reinventing Viennese coffee culture with Salesforce
Julius Meinl is a trailblazer: "Because we achieve tangible added value for our customers through digitalization."
FMCG INSIGHTS
Julius Meinl is a trailblazer: "Because we achieve tangible added value for our customers through digitalization."
– Julius Meinl is implementing Salesforce as a central platform and single source of truth for all customer-related data and workflows.
– The goal: to make established sales and service processes across 19 branches more transparent, structured and scalable.
– With comprehensive self-service offerings based on the Commerce Cloud, Julius Meinl meets the desire of its catering customers for time independence for ordering and for communication with sales and service.
Julius Meinl is a fifth-generation Austrian family business primarily active in the B2B sector, serving the hospitality and business industries. The coffee expert has experienced particularly rapid global growth, resulting in the development of individual, localized sales and service processes across its 19 international subsidiaries over the years. To reduce this complexity and increase transparency for all stakeholders, Julius Meinl is implementing Salesforce as its central CRM platform, focusing on sales and service, as well as providing intelligent and comprehensive 24/7 B2B self-service options. "We're not digitizing for its own sake," says Harald Ziegler, Director of Commercial Digitalization. "Our strategy is consistently implemented with our customers' needs at the forefront, as prioritizing their concerns is a core element of our corporate DNA."
“Several years ago, during the implementation of our ERP system, our branches worldwide expressed an urgent need for a comprehensive CRM system. Until then, processes and structures in sales and customer service had been handled very individually, often via email folders and manually updated spreadsheets, with all the associated challenges regarding transparency, planning, and, not least, GDPR compliance. During the tender process, Salesforce clearly emerged as the favorite among all the providers, as no other solution offers this level of consistency and scalability, especially considering our growth and the future implementation of AI-powered applications.”
“The implementation and rollout, with first-class support from our partner Peak & Peak, were based on a solid business case – supported by a clear roadmap developed jointly with management. To set up the solution with maximum benefit for all stakeholders in the company, we assembled an interdisciplinary CRM team of 28 people. This included key users from all international locations to ensure that every perspective was represented and a consistent bottom-up approach was taken. Because, in addition to the technical implementation, cultural change is, of course, a major and ultimately crucial factor for success. Therefore, it was extremely important for us to consider the requirements of all roles and functions on a global scale from day one to ensure the adoption of the new technology.”
“We launched with the basic functions for sales and customer service and will soon implement integration with telephony, which remains a very important channel. In addition, we're introducing a self-service option that will allow our hospitality customers, in particular, to place reorders flexibly via the Commerce Cloud. We have no shortage of further ideas, but we consistently prioritize them based on their business value. One example is AI-powered route planning for our field service team, as our offering includes not only the coffee but also the associated machines, which require regular maintenance or occasional replacement. We will gradually introduce further AI-powered applications, such as Next Best Actions and telephone customer service support.”
written by Markus Nigl, Senior Manager Customer Marketing at Salesforce
27. Oktober 2026
