BEES Eliminates Friction for Retailers With Personalized, Real-Time Order Data

BEES is Anheuser-Busch InBev's (ABI) proprietary B2B platform that has evolved how ABI interacts with its customers by digitally transforming its sales process. It's a solution for small and medium-sized retailers, helping them browse for products, place orders, earn rewards (where applicable), arrange deliveries, manage invoices, and access business insights all in one place. BEES gives retailers data about which products are growing more popular in their area and provides them with shopping recommendations designed to improve their profitability. BEES' goals are centered around helping small- and medium-sized retailers grow, which in turn helps their communities and economies thrive.

When BEES was looking to give their retail customers better insight into the delivery cycle, with the goal of ultimately reducing anxiety surrounding the process of creating and modifying orders via stronger communication, they turned to Braze. And Braze delivered.

Connecting Customers With Data

Before leveraging Braze, BEES did not have a digital application for customers in most of the markets they serve and had very low response rates to their Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. This meant that retailers had few insights regarding what products were and weren’t in stock, where they were in the delivery cycle, and how they could modify their orders based on that data. This created anxiety amongst retailers, undermining the customer experience that BEES was looking to provide.

Faster Delivery Data, Happier Customers

To begin addressing the gaps identified by the BEES team, their mobile app was launched in each of the markets they serve, allowing them to begin testing in-app messages (IAMs) designed to encourage their retailers to complete NPS surveys. Higher response rates to NPS helped identify a new pain point for SMB retailers—namely, a lack of visibility into the status of their orders and a desire for delivery updates.

With this new insight in hand, BEES used in-app messaging to give retailers visibility on the status of their orders, when they’d been received, confirmed, and were on the way. To make that happen, BEES built an integration between their SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) instance, which helps them run their supply chain services and manages the receipt of transactions from retailers, and Segment, a customer data platform (CDP) and Braze Alloys technology partner that unifies customer information and routes it to other tools in a brand’s tech stack. This integration allowed BEES to stream all relevant events and data to Braze, giving BEES the ability to start tailoring campaigns and sending push notifications and IAMs to customers based on the status of their orders. This integration also seamlessly connected to their delivery driver application, allowing customers to receive updates when BEES dispatched trucks on their delivery routes.

Finally, BEES made use of the Braze platform’s support for Liquid personalization—which automatically substitutes relevant data and values related to a given user into messages—to auto-personalize the messages they sent with customer information and each customer’s chosen language. This has also allowed BEES to create more targeted campaigns, supporting effective customer communications across the board.

Implementing this workflow in every country that BEES serves took only three months, and has proved to be a complete paradigm shift for their team and their customers.

BEES’ Results: Better Communications, More Engaged Retailers

Since adopting Braze, BEES can now better serve their customers and provide real-time, cross-channel notifications about the status of orders that are informed by timely, accurate data. By leveraging Liquid personalization fueled by Segment, BEES was able to send time-sensitive push notifications and in-app messages that alerted customers to order and delivery status updates. The ability to stream data between these solutions and support a high number of personalized touchpoints led to a 15% decrease in the number of order support and product information request tickets that were opened.

This has provided their retailers much-needed assurance that their orders have been received and are on the way, allowing retailers to have better information to run their stores. And as BEES expands to new markets and adds new channels to their messaging mix, BEES has gained the assurance that, with Braze, they’ve adopted an engagement platform that can grow with them.

Key Takeaways

Providing up-to-date data and better opportunities to engage in a meaningful manner makes for happier customers. With Braze and Segment, BEES was able to marry important order and logistical data to provide a more satisfying, reassuring experience to the retailers they serve, all in a personalized way.

Ready to learn more about how great data management and customer engagement go hand-in-hand? Check out our guide on extracting actionable insights to deliver brilliant brand experiences

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