The story of bathstore

The story

Founded in 1990, bathstore emerged with hopes of bringing style, elegance, and class to bathroom designing. Now, bathstore has become the largest bathroom retailer in the UK, with more than 170 stores across the country. Providing quality products and designs according to the customer’s wish, bathstore makes their dream a reality, and at the same time, affordable.

bathstore is a company that has taken retail marketing to the next level. They provide the customers with a unique opportunity to visualize the design of their dream bathroom with the help of an Augmented Reality application. The app provides a 360-degree view of the design, and it also allows customers to interact with and explore the design in a way that no other bathroom retailer provides. To achieve this, the company needed to deploy tablets across the stores and then push the AR application along with other applications to allow their staff to deliver the best possible experience to their customers.

Deploying tablets, managing apps, a central management console - all of these pointed to one thing - Mobile Device Management. The Head of Business Change, Mark Guest, who has shouldered this particularly interesting task, started looking for MDM solutions. Having tried some solutions in the market, he found that they didn’t come with adequate support. For a person who has no prior experience in the field, MDMs can seem a bit tricky. When Mark had enough with those products, he continued his research and found Hexnode MDM. From the first step onwards, Hexnode provided earnest support, which helped Mark to implement the solution. He could finally have the sensible conversation with the tech support team about his real requirements, and Hexnode was able to deliver exactly what he was looking for.

The best way to make a corporate device strictly corporate was by converting it into a kiosk. Hexnode made putting devices in kiosk mode pretty simple. The Android kiosk mode in Hexnode enabled locking down devices to a selected number of apps and websites. It also incorporated a number of settings exclusively for the kiosk mode, which could be enabled or disabled as per the requirements. There was even an option to manually select Wi-Fi networks from the kiosk mode even though the notification bars and settings are disabled. Pushing apps and updates to devices all over the country was unbelievably easy. The apps and upgrades installed silently on the device, requiring no user intervention at all. The apps could also be upgraded or downgraded as per requirement.

Configuring Wi-Fi profiles on the devices made it easy for the users by relieving them the process of configuring Wi-Fi by themselves. Also, there was no need to distribute the Wi-Fi credentials to the users anymore. The devices being corporate devices, unifying the look of the devices is also essential, especially in the field of marketing where every small details matter. Custom wallpapers could be configured on the devices remotely by uploading the image and applying the policy to the device. Even with all the devices to manage, Hexnode made the process effortless through Dynamic groups. Creating a dynamic group with appropriate parameters grouped the devices automatically right after enrolment. Thus, the devices got associated with the policies and applications immediately without any effort from the admin.

In a nutshell

bathstore was on the verge of making a huge leap in the field of marketing. Replacing the traditional paper-based output of the design process with an Augmented Reality app and two other apps that help with instant customer support. Even with all these digitization, implementing this on devices all across the country would have taken some serious time and effort. Though the market is full of MDM solutions, bathstore needed something that suited them.

With Hexnode MDM, bathstore could deploy tablets across 170 stores in the country. Pushing apps and upgrades, configuring Wi-Fi, Kiosk mode management, and so on were done with much less effort with the implementation of Hexnode. The instant and comprehensive support from Hexnode helped Mark to implement the solution with amazing ease. Achieving this goal would not have been possible without the Hexnode MDM platform.