Bosch Power Tools & HD Supply Craft Digital Experiences
One reason why we here at CMSC Media find the CMS industry so fascinating is because of the reach that it has into so many industries. Every e
nterprise-level business needs a CMS, and that CMS directly impacts the brand’s digital experience for consumers all over the world.
Recently, I had the chance to sit down with a few large customers of BloomReach, the popular digital experience platform (DXP). BloomReach’s customer base flows into almost any vertical silo you can imagine. The customers that I had the pleasure of talking to are massive global enterprises, each with diverse and specific needs, but with the shared the common goal to provide their customers with the best possible digital experience.
Keep reading to find out who the BloomReach customers are, and what they had to share with CMSC Media in exclusive, in-person interviews.
Sunny Mallavarapu — Bosch Power Tools
First up, we had the pleasure of meeting Sunny Mallavarapu, Digital Transformational Project Manager of Bosch Power Tools. Sunny is a catalyst within Bosch, putting his focus on employing effective digital transformation in North America. I sat down with Sunny to ask him about Bosch’s digital strategy.
Sunny made it clear just how wide-spread the digital needs of Bosch are. Since Bosch is a worldwide brand, it is vital for them to align their global strategy with its regional strategy by using their internal program OneUX. “OneUX is aligning globally, our digital footprint. So, when it comes to B2C websites, we have roughly 1800 globally, which is unmanageable, and especially from an architecture perspective, there rarely is consistency. There is limited consistency in North America, then if you start looking globally, we don’t do things the same,” said Sunny. “So, we, unfortunately spend a lot of our time re-building basic features and functionalities in every country for every language for every brand rather than actually just trying to focus on how we accelerate globally in the line. “
BloomReach has been able to help Bosch develop and deploy digital strategies that can assist in the global needs of Bosch Power Tools. Beyond that, Bosch is confident that BloomReach will be the right platform to support them in whatever may be coming next.
“BloomReach is our CMS,” Sunny tells us. “So, BloomReach will support from a service perspective CMS type functions and features throughout the organization. And so B2C is our focus today, but you know a feature from a CMS is a feature from a CMS, and we need that at every almost digital touchpoint, and so this is where BloomReach will fit in our architecture.”
Brooke Logan — HD Supply
In keeping with the hardware industry theme, we were also able to chat with Brooke Logan, Senior Product Manager of HD Supply. HD Supply is a B2B MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) marketplace that focuses on customer experience and is another significant customer of BloomReach.
Brooke is the head of what they call, ‘find and evaluate’ at HD Supply—otherwise known as shopping. Basically, Brooke is at the helm of the digital experience for customers who are purchasing from their site.
HD Supply recently underwent a full digital transformation in the form of a website redesign. I wanted to know what their restructuring needs were and how BloomReach was able to provide the best possible end-product.
“We were really interested in bringing very good business to human design into the B2B space, so we really wanted to design a website that anyone could walk up and use and that was going to be delightful and have some really good solid, repeatable experiences,” said Brooke. “BloomReach was really a core partner for us in that because using their API architecture we were really able to use those API’s and create an experience on our site that was really just exactly what we wanted.”
One example of the type of customer-focused innovations they wanted to use on their website was an ‘add to cart’ button directly from the search bar. HD Supply knows that as a B2B company, their customers are likely seasoned employees of businesses and ordering supplies is only a small portion of their busy jobs. HD Supply, through the use of their site, aims to make shopping on their platform as seamless as possible. Brooke told us that through the use of BloomReach, it was very straightforward and flexible to create the site that has everything that they had wanted.
HD Supply’s website redesign goals enable their customers to find what they require quickly and ensure that the experience is personalized to their needs. Continuing forward, its digital strategy remains customer-focused.
Other BloomReach Customers
I also had the opportunity to have conversations with two more customers of BloomReach, including another hardware-related client, Beacon Roofing Supply. Beacon is an American, publicly-traded company which sells residential and non-residential building supplies. Oscar Araya, Director of Digital at Beacon, shared with me that they are the largest publicly-traded building materials distributor in the U.S. There’s no question, a company of that magnitude—with sales over 7 billion a year—needs an effective digital footprint and fabulous customer experience.
Oscar discussed Beacon’s partnership with BloomReach and how the platform helps them to centralize their assets for a more functional digital experience. “We’re using [BloomReach] as our headless delivery platform. So, we centralized all of our assets there, and we serve it through a single page application,” says Oscar. “Basically, BloomReach is the glue that puts all the data sources together.”
Oscar also told me that Beacon found value in using a headless platform because of the flexibility it provides as a means to integrate all of the different technologies, thus achieving the most exceptional customer experience. “[Headless] gives us a lot of flexibility. It gives us a way to merge all the data sources that we have... CRM and ERP systems, complex pricing... Headless allows us to merge all those data sources together and give the customer a greater omnichannel experience,” he said.
Another BloomReach customer we spoke to that hails from Europe and is from a different industry silo than those we had talked to, was Desigual. I was pleased to be given the opportunity to sit down with Ramón Bueno, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Desigual. Desigual, if you’ve never heard of it, is a global fashion giant with over 3,700 employees of 100 different nationalities. Their goal is to “make the world a better place where people can be themselves, expressing their authenticity through unique creations.” Or as Ramón put it, “we make clothes for the people.”
An all-inclusive brand like Desigual—who celebrates the diversity of both their employees and their customers—needs to have a personalized customer experience from no matter where they access the brand. Desigual has been working towards bringing that same personalized online experience offline into physical shops. “We are connecting both worlds in a way to empower our staff,” Ramón explained. By integrating the online experience that Desigual has created with BloomReach into stores, customers are able to have a personalized experience with the brand from any touchpoint.
Desigual has an omnichannel approach to sales and seeks to provide customers with the most seamless shopping experience as possible. “[We take an omnichannel approach] to have a unique view of the stock,” said Ramón. “That way we can offer to our customers every single product wherever the touchpoint that they come to us, whether that’s through desigual.com, brick and mortar, or a department store.”
Ending Thoughts
Every one of these brands has related that are able to have their specific needs met because of the adaptability that BloomReach offers. For them, being a BloomReach customer has positively affected their customer experience and allowed them to create impressive digital experiences.
When choosing which platforms to work with, it’s evident that brands are still looking for customization and personalization options. In this case, all of these companies have found their solution with BloomReach.
Erika Jones
Erika Jones is a Tech Reporter and Content Marketer with CMSC Media. Erika enjoys combining her creativity with her technical skills through graphic design. She has a background in communications and marketing and has a flair for social media and content creation. Erika is an avid traveller and enjoys seeing firsthand how technology connects us all in business and pleasure.