BSH Home Appliances takes on Twilio to revamp digital customer engagement

As part of its plan to revamp the entire digital infrastructure within its customer service organisation, BSH Home Appliances Group is to deploy Flex, a cloud-based contact centre from the Twilio customer engagement platform.

Headquartered in Munich, BSH Home Appliances is said to be the largest manufacturer of home appliances in Europe. Its brands include Gaggenau, Thermador, Neff and Bosch.

Outlining the reasons for its infrastructure upgrade, the company said that in times of economic challenges, with company budgets tight and less disposable income for consumers, business was all about one thing: building and maintaining great customer relationships.

BSH’s global customer service operation, which has won awards, is said to have been built on the understanding that consumers will continue to shop where their needs are understood and met, and where they can communicate with the company through their preferred communication channels – ideally in a personalised way. This, it says, is the is the basis on which customer engagement is delivered.

With this in mind, the subsidiary of Robert Bosch has overhauled its entire digital service, support and customer care infrastructure.

The project had a number of key elements: simplify the work of 1,500 contact centre advisers worldwide; integrate with existing BSH infrastructure; be fully internally programmable and flexibly customisable; integrate digital communication channels such as voice, email, chat, SMS, video and WhatsApp; eliminate data silos and enable a 360° view on consumer data across different touchpoints.

A data silo consists of stored data that is only available to parts of a company, such as certain departments or individual employees, and is therefore segregated within the company. Those who suffer are often the customers who may react with frustration to long waiting times or unanswered inquiries. So BSH said it was looking for a system that can be flexibly adapted to its needs at any time, giving customer service staff an optimised view of all their customers and their data.

To carry out the project, BSH engaged Deloitte Consulting Spain as its trusted adviser near its IT hub in Zaragoza, Spain, which set out to find a cloud-based communications platform that would allow the firm to continue growing globally. The solution was the Twilio Flex cloud-based contact centre solution.

“Looking into different vendors, Twilio was the only company that combines all of our needs in one customisable, scalable solution and also makes data privacy a top priority,” said Gloria Corella, product manager of new agent front-end at BSH. “The Twilio Flex platform gives us the greatest flexibility and customisation possible.

“For example, we have the option to easily integrate our IT infrastructure, such as the existing Avaya telephony landscape, into Twilio Flex. This will enable us to develop customised communications solutions based on our customers’ expectations – to provide even better customer service and create engaging experiences for our customers.”

The roll-out of Twilio Flex will take place in several countries, starting with customer service hubs in France and the UK. The long-term plan is to migrate all of BSH’s 1,500 agents worldwide to Twilio Flex. Deloitte Consulting Spain will help roll out the technology in several regions, tightly integrating the cloud-based service system, serving the needs of customers worldwide. 

“We are proud that leading global brands like the BSH Home Appliances Group choose Twilio Flex to build and customise unique end-to-end customer experiences,” said Simonetta Turek, general manager of customer experience products at Twilio. “Flex allows companies to build the most comprehensive customer journeys they’ve ever created.

“In 2022, we’ve continued to bring industry-leading customer engagement innovations to Flex, including Flex Conversations, a unified API for digital channels now in public beta. We can’t wait to see what BSH, Deloitte and Twilio are able to accomplish together.”