Since 1889, Dräger medical and safety products have helped clinicians and emergency responders to protect, support, and save lives. Today, the company’s “Technology for Life” philosophy is at the heart of its continuing commitment to innovation, quality, and customer intimacy.

To help ensure its customers get exactly the right Dräger technologies for their needs, the company’s sales teams work hard to provide their contacts with up-to-date information on suitable product, application, and service solutions. But surveys of the sales teams revealed that when customers had questions, salespeople could often spend several days tracking down the answers from more than 6,000 colleagues in product management, sales, marketing, and the Dräger Academy. 

It was clear from the surveys that salespeople were spending far too much time searching for information and internal experts – time they could have spent on more valuable interactions with their accounts. What’s more, because only a handful of experts in product management and marketing were known to salespeople, they were inundated with questions, and often had to answer the same questions repeatedly through different channels for different sales colleagues.

The Dräger sales management team knew the company needed a more efficient process to handle sales-related questions and answers in order to increase employee and customer satisfaction. So, it looked for a way to provide faster access to the implicit knowledge held in the heads of employees, identify additional experts to help spread the knowledge-transfer workload, and ensure each question only needed to be answered once.