Transactional email service BSH Relies on Retarus for Its Communication with Customers

Different Systems for Customer Communication

BSH is the biggest producer of household appliances in Europe and one of the worldwide leading companies in their sector. In addition to brands well-known all around the globe, such as Bosch and Siemens as well as Gaggenau and Neff, the BSH brand portfolio also encompasses a range of local brands including Thermador, Balay, Profilo, Constructa, Pitsos, Coldex, and Zelmer.

The company was faced with the special challenge of creating a central email platform for all of these brands, which would enable large volumes of transactional customer emails to be sent reliably. These messages include scheduling appointments during the processing of warranties, conducting customer surveys or communicating with Home Connect, the company’s own smart home portal. The messages are generated by a variety of different systems. Bundling the communication on a single platform required the connection of about a dozen cloud-based business applications, most of which the company had developed on its own, but also including applications and services offered by external providers.

Centralization of Email Customer Communication

BSH had previously never had a central messaging system. Many services simply lacked the technical ability to send large volumes of email independently. An additional challenge was to bring together all the independent solutions employed by the various BSH brands in a sensible and practical way. The objective was thus not only the centralization of the full range of email customer communication initiated by business applications in the technical sense, but also the organizational centralization of such communication. Externally hosted email accounts were to be avoided, partly due to security concerns. Moreover, a high deliverability rating was of course a pre-requisite for the messages not to be classified as spam.

BSH was searching for a scalable solution which was also in a position to effortlessly process large amounts of messages at peak times. Another key requirement for the provider was to offer professional reputation management. The service also had to be flexible enough to connect other applications at any time.

Consolidation of Communication Processes

After a thorough assessment, the decision was made to go with the Transactional Email service offered by Retarus, a trusted partner with which BSH had already been working for many years in other areas. The implementation procedure was carried out as a series of successive “application by application” implementations.

There weren’t any noteworthy problems in the process, remembers Manfred Eder, BSH Group Head Messaging and Communication Services. On the BSH side, Juan José Martinez Moreno was entrusted with the implementation. “The technical transition worked very smoothly. The Retarus platform was connected directly by means of standard interfaces such as SMTP and REST. This makes it a whole lot easier – especially considering the multitude of different applications we have.” Including extensive testing and despite implementation taking place in stages, it took only six months to transition around 12 applications to the new setup.

Where there were challenges to iron out, they were rather organizational in nature: “When bringing so many communication processes together, it’s always necessary to clarify one process or another,” Eder explains. During the on-boarding procedure, BSH was always given highly competent support and consultation by Retarus on these matters, in addition to purely technical issues.

Retarus Transactional Email – High Delivery Rate and Compliance

One of the major advantages of Transactional Email is the comprehensive reputation management. Along with the constant monitoring and optimization of the data flow by the email specialists at Retarus, this ensures that as many emails as possible are reliably placed in their recipients’ inboxes. Especially for critical customer communication, for instance confirmations of appointments, it is crucial to avoid any programmatic emails erroneously being classified as spam by the email service provider under any circumstances.

In addition to the fact that the services are performed at German data centers in compliance with stringent data protection guidelines, the decisive factor was the sound technical know-how that the provider has at its command, according to Eder: “Retarus possesses its own highly competent team of developers, which can respond to our specific requirements in a timely manner.”