One entry point, many paths
Tetra Pak is bringing what was once fragmented into a single digital entry point to unify customer issue reporting.
The aim is straightforward: immediate and first-time-right assistance, transparent and traceable customer issues, simplifying how teams work, and better consistency of issue data quality.
This highlights Tetra Pak’s adaptability. Although a single-entry-point principle is established, channel diversity remains by design. Customers can engage with Tetra Pak through email, phone, chat and remote visual assistance. This is a deliberate choice to support different service scenarios.
“We have customers distributed across more than 160 countries, speaking several languages,” Antonio says. “With very different types of culture, very different types of digital competences in the shopfloor, and different services agreement in place.”
Rather than enforcing a single interaction model, Tetra Pak enables a flexible, connected experience and learns which channels perform best. Over time, customer behavior has shifted naturally.
“For remote support at the beginning, the preferred channel of customers was the phone,” Antonio says. “Now, years later, we’re receiving most of our cases through the chat functionality.”
The reason is usefulness. Chat allows customers to share photos, video and audio. Automatic translation removes language barriers. Issues can be understood and solved faster, with much more clarity.
And Tetra Pak is already looking ahead. “The next leap in service experience comes from proactive service, moving beyond reacting to problems toward anticipating them,” Antonio says. “Providing intelligent, automatic and proactive insights means you can shift your service agreement from a traditional maintenance approach to a kind of advanced approach.”
The shift is driven by the consistent use of performance data and maintenance analytics to deliver clear equipment outcomes. This helps customers improve operational efficiency, quality and sustainability, proving value that is both real and measurable.
Product ownership, incubation and adoption at scale
Organizationally, Tetra Pak’s transformation is anchored in a dedicated services organization called Next Generation Service Operation. Antonio’s team operates globally and is structured around product ownership rather than projects.
“We own one or more service products and relevant capabilities, pairing business needs and customer insights with existing or new solutions, to deliver customer value at scale, support business growth and internal productivity gains,” he says.
The team itself acts as an incubator, he says. That model is intentional. New service capabilities are developed, tested and matured before being handed over to the line organization to scale. It allows experimentation without destabilizing core operations.
Remote support is a case in point. What began as an experiment has become one of Tetra Pak’s most impactful service innovations. “The initiative of remote support has been the most successful in terms of transformation of work in terms of sales,” Antonio says. “A resolution rate of over 90% in remote support has been reflected in extremely positive customer experience feedback.”
Internally, the benefits are just as tangible. “We’ve improved the work-life balance of our service engineers,” Antonio says. Travel, costs and CO2 impact have all come down — a reminder that experience innovation often improves employee experience, too.
Experience evolution isn’t a foregone conclusion, though
None of this happens automatically. Adoption is the hardest part, especially at Tetra Pak’s scale.
“You need to make happy a very wide number of stakeholders,” Antonio says, pointing to the company’s 27 markets and thousands of service engineers worldwide.
The biggest lesson he’s learned? “Change management was really the key to success,” Antonio says. “Listening to customer needs through our colleagues in the markets and collaborating with them to design the new capabilities was essential to build trust and empathy.”
This makes end users feel heard and ensures each solution is embraced and adopted.
Antonio’s product owners build that momentum internally with early adopters and champions who can prove value locally and pull others along. Leadership sponsorship matters, too, but Antonio is clear it must be balanced.
If you need to transform the way of working, you will do much more effort going only with a top-down leadership approach. You need to balance the approach for a seamless change management experience.
— Antonio Milella, Director of Connected Experience at Tetra Pak
The journey hasn’t been without its setbacks. Antonio openly reflects on some internal digital initiatives where complexity was underestimated, requirements weren't clear enough, or a holistic approach that included processes and operating models wasn't taken. These didn't fail quietly but taught the organization what not to do when managing change.
These lessons now shape the way new initiatives are defined, managed and implemented.
Technology, data and the AI challenge
On technology, Antonio is cautiously confident. That confidence comes largely from the equipment layer. Sensors, alarms and embedded automation allow Tetra Pak to extract data, monitor performance and support customers remotely.
But constraints remain. Cybersecurity is moving up the agenda. Connectivity varies by market, customer and factory. Regulation can define what’s possible. And customer maturity determines whether insights lead to action.
Above all, there’s AI — the area Antonio sees as both the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk.
“The big challenge for us is how we can secure a successful introduction of AI capability in our digital services and deliver the expected value for customers,” he says.
The reasons are structural, not technical hype. Data quality. Knowledge management. Architecture that was built over decades. “You need to understand how to integrate your knowledge base systems, how to harmonize and break the silos of data, how to seamlessly connect all customer touchpoints,” Antonio says.
This is where Tetra Pak can leverage tech partners. “We are not an AI company,” he says. “But choosing the right partners — and understanding the value of their solution, how it fits to your business’s needs and what are their technology roadmaps — is critical.”
To manage this complexity, Tetra Pak has adopted a federated approach. Central IT governs the development of AI capability and relevant policy while each business area defines and explores use cases aligned to real business needs.
In Services, that takes the form of an AI Forum, where ideas are collected, assessed and prioritized by subject matter experts. Promising ideas move through proof of concept and then get tested as MVPs. It’s all deliberate, not impulsive.
Antonio sees this as the emerging role of digital leaders in industrial organizations: balancing governance with experimentation, and ambition with realism.
Connected isn’t a destination. It’s alignment at scale.
After years of transformation work, Antonio’s advice to manufacturers aiming to become more connected is strikingly simple. “It’s really essential to have an aligned strategy across the different departments and to play together in the same direction,” he says.
“And it is not just about developing a new technology capability but more to understand how this can enable a new way of working in terms of the operating model. And, finally, how we can deliver more value to customers by evolving our service business model.”
Without that alignment, technology alone won’t change how work gets done or how value is created.
For Tetra Pak, becoming a connected manufacturer isn’t about replacing people with platforms. It’s about building an ecosystem where service, experience, operations and technology reinforce each other — at scale, across markets and over time.
The journey is far from over, but the direction is clear. And for Tetra Pak, the future of service is no longer dispatched. It’s connected.
