Music Tribe “hits refresh” with “customer and digital obsession” through Microsoft Cloud

When Uli Behringer started building his own music studio and equipment nearly 40 years ago, he didn’t set out to start a business. As a struggling musician and university student, he couldn’t afford good audio equipment, so he decided to build his own. His friends began asking him to also make equipment for them, and soon his apartment became a production facility. This experience shaped Uli’s purpose and his mission—to provide quality and affordable audio equipment for everyone. To this day, this is Music Tribe’s and Uli’s purpose as Customer Experience Obsessor (CEO).

Valued at an estimated US$2 billion, Music Tribe is one of the most recognized audio companies in the industry. Its world-class brands Midas, Klark Teknik, Lab Gruppen, Lake, Tannoy, Turbosound, Behringer, TC Electronic, TC Helicon, Aston Microphones and Coolaudio have been used by famous artists like Earth, Wind & Fire, Metallica, U2, Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and Kanye West. 

The company’s mission is captured in four words – ‘We empower. You create.’

“We believe in empowering our customers by providing them with the best possible products and services, at prices everyone can afford. We believe in the total democratization of music and empowering less privileged people, so they can discover and develop a love for music,” Uli shares. “Nothing is more rewarding than carefully listening to your customers, delivering products that exceed their expectations, while offering them at affordable prices. That’s the reason we exist.”

Customer obsession and the pursuit of happiness

Listening to customers is the key to Music Tribe’s success, and to Uli’s own happiness. “I remember a friend asking me, ‘Uli, are you happy?’ and I realized that I wasn’t,” he reflects. “After some deep soul searching, I discovered that I had lost touch with our customers, the very people that made me start the company. I became a ‘business executive’ and lost my purpose in the process.” 

“Most organizations are driven by creating shareholder value, when in fact our focus must be on customer value,” Uli adds. “Customers are the only ones that will keep an organization relevant and alive. Financial rewards are always a consequence of great customer experience.”

To get back on track, Uli went online and began communicating with Music Tribe’s customers. He then took time off from operations to create the new company’s Customer Obsession vision. But he soon realized that he had to overcome one big challenge.

“Music Tribe has millions of customers,” Uli shares. “I, or anyone in the company, can’t possibly speak to all of them personally.” He began thinking about building a digital infrastructure that would allow the company to measure and track both internal and external customer experience. 

Uli found the answer when he came across Satya Nadella’s book “Hit Refresh”. 

Taking Nadella’s words to heart, Music Tribe started its own refresh journey by first getting rid of all waste. It started with paper documents. All Tribers were given a few weeks to either dispose or scan all paper documents, after which everything paper-based was disposed, together with all cabinets and drawers. 

Music Tribe then went through 30 years of accumulated infrastructure, deleted 135 terabytes of redundant and obsolete data, as well as removed 3 data centers, 600 servers and 18 legacy applications. It took two years to clean up and restructure over a million documents, but the results were worth it. “All our files are now accurate, organized and stored on Microsoft 365 SharePoint” says Uli as he shows their online filing system on a mobile app. “Our Tribers are very happy that all information can now be found in a heartbeat as all repositories are centralized and accessible through self-service.” 

Overall productivity in the organization has increased by 300 percent, while providing easy and secure access through Microsoft Sentinel.

Technology partner Softline assisted in the transformation. “Music Tribe is a highly determined and agile organization with Digital Transformation at its core, so working with them was a very exciting challenge. We knew things would evolve rapidly,” shares Atul Ahuja, SVP APAC, India & MEA at Softline. “Music Tribe was keen to adopt cloud native systems and technologies wherever needed. They were also ready to adopt a scalable cloud infrastructure. Working with such a forward-thinking team made the challenge much more manageable and exciting.” 

After digitizing all files, the next step was making sure that Music Tribe’s infrastructure support this new way of working. “It became clear that we had to reinvent our entire digital architecture,” Uli says. “Like most companies, we had been accumulating and running a complex and convoluted IT infrastructure, mostly around outdated and fragmented applications.”

Flying the plane while rebuilding it

After researching available solutions, Music Tribe adopted an entirely new system to handle its operations. Sonata Software assisted in the process used its proprietary framework solution, Platformation, for the migration. “We understood what Music Tribe wanted to achieve, and recommended they use Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations with an integrated data platform on Azure,” shares Satish Reddy Lekkala, Delivery Manager at Sonata. 

What came next would scare the most experienced technologists and digital transformation advocates. “We ripped out our whole IT infrastructure in the company,” Uli says while chuckling. “We replaced 18 legacy applications in one shot, including our entire ERP system. ”Music Tribe designed the new system architecture around its data, gaining holistic insights across the organization—from customer interactions to supply chain, human resources, research and development, and finance. This felt like flying a plane while rebuilding it.”

 “Now that we're on the Azure cloud, we don’t have to worry about integration. We don't have to waste our time plastering broken API's every time there’s a system upgrade, nor do we have to worry about enterprise security,” Uli explains.    

Creating data-driven customer experience

Uli believes that building a purpose and customer-driven organization requires a purpose-driven digitalization journey. “You need to define the data set that allows you to drive outstanding customer experience and related data insights. Your master data needs to be fully structured and consistent, all systems totally integrated, and everything built on a ‘single source of truth’ platform,” he shares. 

To meet this vision, Music Tribe built a data lake that integrated with its operational applications. It utilized Azure AI to achieve real-time data queries and insights. “Instead of disconnected data silos, we can now see everything from the big picture to the smallest granularity,” Uli affirms.

Empowering Music Tribers

One of the greatest benefits of Music Tribe’s shift to Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365 is automation. “Time is the most precious currency we all possess because we’ll run out of it one day. You can only spend time with your loved ones and customers when you make time, and this comes from focus and efficiencies,” Uli shares. “Our Digital Obsession disruption removed all administrative and repetitive tasks, which don’t add value in peoples’ lives.” 

Tribers now use the redeemed time to upskill themselves through Microsoft Viva, which was implemented with the help of technology partners Avanade and Go1. Within four weeks of launching Microsoft Viva with Go1’s Premium learning library, Music Tribe experienced an 80% leap in Tribers actively engaging with learning content.

“We’re proud to have played an integral role in Music Tribe’s employee experience journey,” says Bhavya Kapoor, Southeast Asia Managing Director at Avanade. “Together, we’ve unlocked workplace value and innovation through Microsoft Viva. Putting people at the heart of the organization and empowering them with the tools to grow and thrive has enabled us to reimagine how they learn and collaborate in the world of hybrid work.”

It's all about purpose

When asked how Music Tribe survived the disruptive and painful digitalization process, Uli says, “It’s all about purpose. If you can align your organization to believe in a common purpose, your digital transformation becomes meaningful. You can measure whether you provide value to your customers and how this ultimately leads to greater customer advocacy.”

“We call it the 4 P’s—Purpose, People, Process and Products,” Uli continues. “Once you have defined your purpose, you surround yourself with the people who believe in the same vision and that’s when the magic happens. As a team, you map out all processes that define how to collaborate across the whole organization and with your customers. True magic begins when a common purpose and trust is developed, which will drive co-innovation and result in great products.”