Case Study: Betterware

The Challenge

Through a new email hosting and connectivity contract, Betterware needed to achieve:

• a more reliable and resilient hosted email service
• the capacity to handle large volumes of email distributed outside of the Betterware domain
• an improved mechanism for managing large mailing lists
• higher bandwidth lines to enable faster and more reliable internet connectivity
• a seamless migration to avoid disruption to the business.

With a widely dispersed team of distributors, Betterware relies on regular email updates to keep its sales force fully informed about key product and service information. Whilst this provides an efficient way to share information, it also results in large volumes of outbound email. As the distributors and coordinators use external email addresses, a significant portion of this traffic needs to move outside of the Betterware domain. The company had been relying on a third party hosted service for a number of years already, but the existing system was no longer suitable for the increasingly dynamic needs of the business.

Betterware’s business model means that the company distribution list is a highly important part of daily operations, and hence is updated on a weekly basis. This helps ensure that everyone who needs critical information receives it. Guaranteeing that the update is both accurate and efficient posed a significant challenge. If emails do not reach the sales force in a timely manner, it would adversely affect the running of their businesses – which could impact revenues.

Creating the right solution

In addition to the dependence on email to bring together the extensive workforce, the vast majority of Betterware’s sales orders come through as electronic data files. A loss of connectivity would not just impact email, but also incoming sales orders. Such downtime would also have a more broadly disruptive impact on the business. Warehouse scheduling, order processing and dispatch and the nationwide transportation of goods all hinge on a careful balance of product stocks and employee work loads. Within Betterware’s warehouse, orders need to arrive at just the right times to balance the system. A loss of connectivity would put this out of sync. 

Kcom recently launched a new hosted email platform, which was particularly well-suited to Betterware’s needs. However, to help Betterware understand how the proposed solution would work for their business, Kcom created a dummy distribution list to show that the service could deliver to the level required and beyond. This illustrated the effectiveness of the service, but also flagged up potential challenges the new deployment might face. Kcom adapted its solution to ensure that all outbound messages would be received successfully irrespective of domain. Betterware therefore received a truly tailored service which has dramatically reduced any loss of critical communications between the core office and the remote sales force.

Conclusion

The project was hence defined not by the simple deployment of an existing solution, but by the need to overcome challenges specific to Betterware – none more so than in the management of the email distribution list. As a core business process, it was key to find precisely the right solution. Kcom therefore undertook development in-house to create a superior mechanism for purging and reloading lists. Betterware has already identified that this has saved as much as a full man day a week, whilst simultaneously being more accurate and reliable. 

“We looked at a range of suppliers when seeking to migrate from our existing system. Some were too expensive, and others could not deliver the services we required – specifically in regards to the large volumes of outbound email we put out, typically to a large number of users who are outside of the Betterware domain. Only Kcom was able to deliver services to meet our demands, at a cost effective level.”
John Embrey, Head of IT, Betterware