Global Mail Deployment

Functional Area

Google Apps - Email

Client

A British fashion house, distributing clothing and fashion accessories and licensing fragrances. The Firm is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

Challenge

The Firm operates retail outlets in 19 countries globally. Engaging with employees in these outlets was a significant challenge given the lack of enterprise communication and collaboration tools. Legacy systems consisted of as few as one desktop PC per store, with a common store login used by up to 30 different employees. Employees were often ‘out of the loop’ on company communications, and with no way to engage customers through official channels, store employees were starting to send messages from their personal accounts, risking Brand Value and also compromising IT security.

A low-cost solution was needed to deploy an enterprise-class communication and collaboration platform to the firm's stores.

Approach

White Stratus was engaged to deploy Google Apps to stores in 19 countries. A phased roll-out starting with Core-IT, followed by Early Adopters and then finally 6 sequential Go-Lives region by region was executed.

There were a number of custom requirements that were not natively supported by Google Apps and these were implemented as App Engine applications.

1) Automated Signature files - The Marketing Department wanted to use employee email addresses to communicate promotional message to customers. An application to pull employee data (name, phone number) from active directory, and combine it with marketing messages (“Winter sale starts Monday!”) to create a standardized email signature was created by White Stratus.

2) Email Templates: Many of the Retail Associates were not experienced with format and style of business email communications. To ensure that messages sent from employees to customers would follow corporate communications guidelines, an application to provide standard email templates was built (similar to ‘canned responses’ in Google Labs, which was not enabled on the customer domain) by White Stratus.

3) Employee off-boarding: In-store employees experience high turnover in the retail sector. In order to manage documents owned by employees who were leaving the firm and would have the accounts disabled, and application was built to automatically move documents to a service account. This application ran automatically on any suspended accounts, providing a simple but effective solution to the off-boarding problem.

Results

The Google Apps rollout was completed in under 6 weeks - a record time for a rollout across multiple countries.

Benefits

Retail associates now have, for the first time ever, access to tools that allow them to communicate across stores and between stores and headquarters. The quality of customer-facing communications has improved and levels of employee engagement has risen as well.