Customer satisfaction

To support our customers with their sustainability ambitions, we need to make our processes and value chain as environment-friendly and socially responsible as possible. For this purpose, our strategic focus is on developing and expanding a readily available range of innovative products with a reduced environmental footprint (such as thermally tempered glass or reusable solutions). By the same token, good customer relationships – which create demand for our products – enable us to plan our production capacity and utilisation, leading in turn to more efficient use of energy and other resources.

Concepts, policies and measures

Customer care and retention, and interaction with customers

The customer journey starts even before the first contact is made: if we are to win new customers, they must be convinced of the advantages of glass as a packaging material. Under the umbrella of the Friends of Glass initiative, we support awareness-raising measures and campaigns that inform consumers and potential new customers about the health and environmental benefits of glass, based on scientific facts.

Dialogue with our customers focuses on commercial excellence, which is anchored in the Leader in quality strategic pillar in our Strategy 2030+. This is intended to ensure an optimal customer experience throughout the entire customer journey. Our aim is to understand our customers’ requirements and respond to them with appropriate products and services. This means that we address our customers’ needs in the best possible way, from initial contact and enquiry processing through to and then identifying a suitable product or desired service. We regard developing products jointly with our customers as a sign of successful trust-based collaboration. In line with our customer focus, we collect customer feedback and drive initiatives to improve collaboration on a continuous basis.

The illustration below shows the four golden rules of the customer centricity mindset. Responsiveness means that we answer customer enquiries promptly. Flexibility requires us to seek out solutions for customers’ requests, even when they are challenging. Urgency means that we address our customers’ concerns quickly, prioritising those of our key customers. We practice Proactive communication by providing our customers with news and identifying future opportunities.

We use regular customer surveys to measure customer satisfaction – and, therefore, the way the customer experience is perceived. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most important indicator for this purpose. It allows comparisons with our competitors. We assess these aspects in customer surveys:

• Willingness to recommend Vetropack to others
• Performance compared to direct market competitors
• Opportunities to develop new services
• Indications of future expenditure, measured by our share of wallet (SOW)

Alongside customer surveys, we rely on market and trend analyses to advance the strategic development of our business. We also utilise findings from market research, and aim to pursue a customer-oriented sales and marketing strategy.

Ultimately, direct interaction with our customers is essential so we can identify their concerns and respond to them immediately. This is why local managers at the Vetropack sites maintain direct dialogue with our customers. This makes it simpler to implement appropriate projects at speed.

We use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system throughout the company to manage customer interactions. CRM simplifies data acquisition, data management and reporting, so the sales team has more time available to interact directly with our customers. Going forward, CRM will also be enabled to record and process customer complaints on a systematic basis and provide better insights.

At present, we already analyse the reasons for every customer complaint and we reach out to customers with comprehensive answers. We assign complaints to four categories: product, packaging, logistics, and commercial process.

We have implemented a Strategic Account Management (SAM) programme to manage our customer relationships on a systematic basis. SAM identifies our strategic customers, and it also supports the tools and processes needed to address the concerns of our key customers. As another SAM activity, we maintain regular exchanges between employees of our company and their counterparts with the same function in the customer’s company.

To organise our processes efficiently and systematically, we use SAP as our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system for the entire order-to-cash process.

The environmental footprint of our products

There is growing interest in information about the ecological footprint. Eco-balance data helps to persuade potential new customers to opt for glass products, in view of their environmental footprint. We therefore offer comprehensive data on the environmental impact of the entire product life cycle, in accordance with the standards specified by the European Container Glass Federation (FEVE). For this purpose, we use a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) tool that was developed jointly with FEVE. More information about our eco-balance calculator is available here.

3D printing laboratory

With our 3D-printing laboratory in Pöchlarn (Austria), we can offer our customers the opportunity to gain ‘hands-on’ knowledge of a packaging design prior to first production. Thanks to a special resin, we can accurately reproduce the geometry of the glass containers to be manufactured – so, even before production, our customers can get a sense of their look and feel. They can also assess the products with their stakeholders at an early stage, which makes the market launch simpler.

Sensor for optimal filling speed

One challenge for glass is the risk of filling line downtime due to breakage. This risk can influence the filling speed for foods and beverages. Bottlers and fillers who use glass packaging sometimes make a trade-off by lowering the filling speed to lessen the risk of breakage: this, in turn, reduces the filling rate and overall operating efficiency. In response to this challenge, we produce an exact replica of the glass container and use a sensor to perform load tests. With maximum precision, the sensor measures the forces acting on the glass container during filling. Thanks to this information, customers can adjust the filling speed optimally and implement targeted line improvements so as to increase throughput.

Joint product development

One of Vetropack’s strategic focal points is continuous optimisation of the product mix. We are committed to joint product development so we can implement our customers’ specific requirements. This is because customised products enable our customers to stand out from the competition in the market through design and functionality, and attract new consumers thanks to unique selling points. An account of a successful collaboration of this sort is available here.

Joint product development focuses increasingly on packaging reduction targets, in response to upcoming regulations and requirements for packaging such as the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). In this context, we are assisting our customers with implementing the rightweighting concept. This states that only as much material should be used as is needed for the packaging to fulfil its purpose. We are confident that our innovation of thermally tempered lightweight reusable glass will attract new customers – and in this way, we are responding to the preference for packaging with a smaller environmental footprint.

Online presence

Our customers can consult the online catalogue on the Vetropack website to find all our glass packaging products for beverages (including wines, spirits, beer, soft drinks and mineral water, etc.) as well as foods. Users of the online catalogue can access products based on a wide range of criteria such as filling volume, shape, colour, and closure type.

We publish Success Stories about satisfied customers on our corporate website or our LinkedIn channel. By posting these stories, we aim to motivate our employees, inspire our existing customers and attract new customers.

Progress and events in the reporting year

Performance indicators

Besides the Net Promoter Score, another indicator we use to measure customer satisfaction is ‘Customer complaints per 10 million units of glass packaging sold’. For competitivity reasons, however, we do not disclose this figure.

GRI 417-2 Incidents of non-compliance concerning product and service information and labeling

No significant incidents of non-compliance concerning product information labeling were notified in 2024. (2023: 0).