Bathroom Brands has invested heavily in a new technology transformation designed to make everything from ordering and stock checking to returns and sales support faster and easier. But the ambition goes much further than simply putting orders online…
For a bathroom supplier, investing in technology can easily mean giving the website a refresh, adding an online ordering system and perhaps upgrading the database.
But Bathroom Brands has gone further, much further. It has invested millions in a system that will revolutionise how the company interacts with its retailers and while technology may be the ‘how’, customer service is the ‘why’.
Behind the launch of its new BB 24/7 retailer portal sits a much broader overhaul of the technology underpinning the company – encompassing live stock and pricing information, logistics, customer service, operations, sales analytics and even the systems its field sales team uses before walking through a showroom door.
And, of course, the latest AI plays a massive part.
The scale of the investment is significant. Bathroom Brands CEO Patrick Riley estimates that the company has spent more than £10 million on its new technology infrastructure, with an internal IT team of 12 supported by around six external consultants.
This is not an off-the-shelf system, it has been built by the company from the ground up but the objective, he insists, is not technology for technology’s sake. It is simply about making Bathroom Brands easier for retailers to deal with.
At the heart of that is BB 24/7, and the brief behind it was deceptively simple: create the B2B equivalent of Amazon.
“The reason for that was our customers don’t like IT in general, but they will use Amazon,” Riley explains. “So we’re hoping it’ll be easier to convert them because it’s very common language.”
The result is deliberately more consumer website in feel and use than traditional trade portal.
Stock check
Retailers can see their own pricing, live stock availability, incoming stock dates and made-to-order lead times. They can view open orders, back orders and returns from a central dashboard as well as access invoices, credit notes, proof of delivery and packing slips, and track deliveries.
There is even an RRP mode that hides the retailer’s buying price, allowing a salesperson to turn the screen towards the consumer and use BB 24/7 as part of the showroom conversation.
One of its most significant features, however, is the PO reader. Rather than re-keying an order into the Bathroom Brands system, retailers can drag a purchase order into BB 24/7 – whether it is a PDF, Word document or Excel file – and the system reads it automatically.
It identifies Bathroom Brands products, checks prices and availability and highlights discrepancies. If something is out of stock, it can show when it is due back in or suggest an alternative product. Discontinued products can similarly be linked directly to their replacements.
Crucially, retailers do not necessarily have to change the way they already create orders.
“You can take your sales document and just bang it in,” says Andrew Riley, the one tasked with bringing this whole project together. “Immediately we’ll tell you if its in stock, out of stock, give you alternatives, and tell you dates of delivery.”
That removes one of the biggest sources of friction in the traditional supplier-retailer relationship: the chain of emails and phone calls needed to resolve problems after an order has been submitted.
Bathroom Brands believes checking pricing at the point of order could reduce invoice queries by more than 50%.
The technology is also increasingly reflecting the practical realities of how retailers work. The system now recognises delivery schedules, for example. If Bathroom Brands only delivers to a particular area on a Monday and Thursday, those are the dates the retailer will be offered rather than allowing them to request an impossible next-day delivery.
It is, Andrew Riley says, the product of continual refinement.
“We have a meeting every week – how can we improve it?” he explains. “You can’t build something and then get them to fit in with you. You’ve got to build something entirely to fit in with the retailer.”
That means catering for everything from highly sophisticated national customers with automated ordering systems to small independents still comfortable with paper-based processes.
Returns
And Bathroom Brands says adoption is already encouraging. Just a few weeks after launch BB 24/7 had more than 2,000 registered users, around 700 had been active in the previous week and 19% of all orders were already being processed through the portal. On one day, 55% of returns had also been submitted through it.
But BB 24/7 is just the front of a much bigger technology programme.
An AI-powered technical chatbot is being developed using live product information, while a new acrylic shower-panel configurator will allow consumers to design a panel arrangement and generate a unique code that can be taken to a retailer. The retailer enters that code into BB 24/7 and the correct products and configuration are automatically added to the order.
A clever quote generator has also recently been added.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Bathroom Brands is automating orders that still arrive by email. Its Salesforce system can read an incoming PO, identify the products and PO number and create a draft order for a customer-service agent to approve – potentially turning an hour spent manually entering a large order into a simple checking exercise.
The company has also integrated live stock and customer-specific pricing into TruBlue.
Then there is the sales team. New AI-supported “battle cards” pull together information on individual retailer accounts before a salesperson visits. They can highlight outstanding customer-service or credit issues, sales trends, products on display that are underperforming and potentially successful products the retailer does not currently display.
“The night before, just after midnight, it’ll go into the scheduler,” Andrew Riley explains. “The moment the area sales manager clicks on that, it opens a PDF for that customer, individualised with all the data.”
Empowering
A salesperson could therefore show a retailer that they bought 20 of a particular product six months ago but none since, or that a finish they do not currently display is performing strongly with consumers nearby.
For Patrick Riley, that changes the role of data from something Bathroom Brands uses internally into something that can actively help its retail customers.
“I think we’re empowering our salespeople to really help our customers sell more,” he says.
There are operational benefits too. Bathroom Brands says 98% of orders in July went through without an issue, average telephone waiting time across its lines was 35.5 seconds and inbound calls had fallen by around 20%. August sales, meanwhile, were running 23% ahead.
Patrick Riley stresses that this huge investment in the latest technology is designed to help people, not replace them. In fact, Bathroom Brands is adding salespeople to grow its team and even has a member of customer service dedicated to helping customers use the new systems.
And that illustrates perhaps the most important distinction in this ongoing initiative.
For retailers, the significance of Bathroom Brands’ investment is not that there is more technology sitting behind the supplier. It is that much of the everyday friction of doing business – checking stock, querying prices, chasing deliveries, finding paperwork, processing returns and resolving ordering mistakes – can potentially disappear.
“This is 100% a people business and this is all designed to make our customers happy,” Patrick Riley says. “These are simply tools that will help us do that much more effectively to the benefit of everyone.”
Find out more about Bathroom Brands at bathroombrands.com
