2020 Sustainability Report

20 Dialogue with our stakeholders is very important to us, because it indicates to us the direction in which we need to steer our sustainability strategy. Dialogue is therefore a continuous process that we integrate into our day-to-day work and engage in regularly. Investors Because we are a family owned company, investors are, on the one hand, kept informed on an individual basis and, on the other, are sent monthly reports from the individual companies in the group. Meetings of the Board of Directors are convened four to six times a year. A General Meeting takes place once a year. We engage in dialogue directly with our investors and communicate with them regularly, through monthly reporting, annual reports and end-of-year financial statements. Customers These can be divided into specialist retailers and direct clients. Talks are held with both customer groups at the start of each year. In the course of the meeting, we reach agree- ment with the specialist retail partners on how we will work together (and this applies from March until February of the following year). We visit our specialist retailers regularly, approximately once a month, particularly to discuss products, training courses and so on. Direct clients are visited on an irregular basis, anything from twice a week to once every two months, as required, to talk about current issues, training courses and so on. Training courses are generally held at the Bützberg site or in Endingen. In 2019, our Customer Service department conducted a survey to measure how satisfied our customers are with the Girsberger sales force, both the internal and external teams. We particu- larly focused on comparing the service provided in-house and externally, to assess whether there was scope for improvement, and if so, where. Our service technicians questioned our cus- tomers and noted down their assessments. 655 customers (66 specialist retailers and 589 end users) from Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Benelux expressed their opinions about the way our in-house customer service team dealt with their order and how it was then handled by our service technicians. 94.7% of the customers asked said that they were very satisfied with the in-house service department, and 5.3% said they were satisfied. In response to the second question about their level of satisfaction with the way their order was handled by our service technicians, 96.9% of the customers in the survey said they were very satisfied. 3.1% were satisfied. It was pleasing to see that there were no dissatisfied responses. Consequently, the survey did not give rise to any immediate or urgent need for action. This survey is repeated on a two-year cycle, so the next customer survey will take place in 2021. Facilitators (architects, designers and planners) Facilitators have come to play a very important role in our business. The Customized Furniture and Remanufacturing business units have now specialised in producing bespoke furniture for commercial use, based on designs by architects and interior designers, and also in refurbishing existing furniture according to their own ideas and taking account of environmental, economic and design aspects. Their ideas are then made a reality at our workshops in Bützberg, Endingen and Serbia. We are in continuous dialogue with these facilitators to develop and manufacture furniture of all kinds – from unique one-off items to series production. Often these projects have to be accomplished at high speed and require great flexibility, while maintaining the highest quality standards. Those are precisely the reasons why we also give the facilitators the opportunity to work with us in the workshop on the designs and prototypes. That is essential if such joint projects are to be completed successfully. Our stakeholders “ Dialogue with our stakeholders is a continuous process that we integrate into our day-to-day work and engage in regularly. ”