Xiaomi improves its customer service and post-sales supply chain management with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Growing around the world

Xiaomi is focused on being the most user-centric mobile internet company, with a vision to “make friends with users and be the coolest company in the users’ hearts.” The company aims to constantly exceed expectations through innovations with its mobile phones, tablets, and smart-home devices. Since its start in 2010, Xiaomi has grown rapidly, delighting the online following “Fans of Xiaomi” in China by expanding from mobile to IoT and developing its electronics markets overseas. The company made the Fortune Global 500 list for the fourth time, a ranking of 266—up 72 places compared to 2021. Xiaomi now has presence in more than 100 regions and countries, and its smartphone sales ranks within the top five in 62 global markets. 

Making do with siloed tools

As Xiaomi experienced rapid growth and expansion, its self-developed, fragmented customer service system struggled to keep up with the massive demand for human resources and time. The system’s third-party apps were completely independent of one another, meaning that users needed to manually communicate information via phone and instant messaging tools. Customer service teams received customer requests from different channels, queried information in different systems, and then returned to the corresponding channel system for feedback. 

Xiaomi was also seeking to improve visibility across its global post-sales supply chain for spare parts. Spare parts are crucial for product repairs, and being able to forecast the availability of parts helps Xiaomi estimate how long a repair might take. But Xiaomi didn’t have a unified data platform for tracking and managing parts, and its existing processes were heavily manual and required employees to have extensive and specialized knowledge of historical data. And, like the customer service system, the absence of integration among systems resulted in a lack of real-time information sharing. 

“When starting this project, we needed to solve how to complete the docking with dozens of internal and external systems in six months, while considering the different usage habits of users around the world, and finally provide a unified, efficient and smooth experience,” says En Yang, IT Director at Xiaomi. “Most importantly, we needed to comply with local laws and regulations in the global implementation process.”

Improving internal processes

Xiaomi turned to Microsoft to replace its disparate system and build a unified customer relationship management (CRM) platform on Dynamics 365 Customer Service with some components of Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. “The Xiaomi team aimed to establish an efficient customer and post-sales management system. With the help of the lightweight PaaS service from Azure, the system can quickly connect with other business systems,” says Guijun Zhao, Chief Architect at Xiaomi. The switch from the self-developed customer service system to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service took half a year of demand research, solution design, development, and launch. 

Xiaomi used Power Apps to create an app used by the front line to directly interact with customers and Power Virtual Agents for its AI service bot that handles general questions from customers. Dynamics 365 components include Customer Service for a unified system and better customer service agent experience, and Supply Chain Management for the overall spare parts supply chain. 

Additionally, Xiaomi uses Azure Functions and Azure API Management to securely connect third-party business systems to internal business systems, and Azure Translator to quickly generate product manuals in multiple languages. 

The new international customer service system supports multi-language capabilities, compliance, and unified management levels. 

Building a comprehensive experience 

Despite the huge obstacles brought by the outbreak of COVID-19, Xiaomi launched the new Dynamics 365 and Power Platform-backed customer service system globally in 2022. “In this project, Microsoft, as a software product provider, participated in the implementation process of the project from many aspects such as architecture design, security assessment, and best practices,” says Haiqiang He, Chief Architect at Xiaomi. “After the project is launched, it will continue to provide technical capabilities to help Xiaomi team improve its technical capabilities.” The new system has covered 34 countries and supported 19 languages, and the post-sales services have reached 80 countries and 10 regions. The spare parts system supports over 40 warehouses and 700 multi-level branch organizations in the world. 

With Dynamics 365 Customer Service, the company has gained a unified workbench for multiple communication channels (online, email, social media) and for financial processes, data integration, and security authentication. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management helps employees provide an end-to-end spare-parts management system for pull-through planning and execution. The new system includes interoperability with peripheral systems like post-sales service and financial system settlement. It can also display the comprehensive online history of materials and processes, visualize the current inventory, and actively monitor and manage inventory levels in real time.

For now, Xiaomi is excited to add a unified customer service approach and enhance its global spare-parts supply to further its mission of exceeding customer expectations with fast deployment through Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Mike Wan, Senior Manager at Xiaomi says, “Now, with the out-of-the-box features and flexible, open framework from Dynamics 365, the customer service teams can access multi-channel customer messages on a uniformed platform and handle them in a timely manner, creating an end-to-end, visual closed-loop management.” 

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