“It is my mission to show customers the transformational benefits that platforms can bring to their organization and think about ways to achieve those benefits.”
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google | Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Most people think the ultimate shopping experience is created by combining a fab shop interior with an appealing product display. But they couldn’t be more wrong. Besides visual stimuli, the ultimate shopping experience stimulates all senses – from smell, touch to taste. It should also be a safe experience, and, perhaps most importantly, we don’t want to wait. Queing for checkouts or inventory checks have a negative impact on the overall shopping experience. So, what are retailers doing to provide the ultimate in-store shopping experience? They are investing in all kinds of advanced technologies.
Having all these technologies installed is one thing, but you also need to maintain them to ensure everything keeps working. After all, when you have seduced your customer to make a purchase, it’s quite important that your Point of Sale device – cash register or payment terminal – actually works.
Let’s investigate how important availability of technology is for a retailer. Let’s assume a fictive apparel retail chain called Fashion Flavors owns 100 shops with an average turnover of € 1000 per hour. A retail survey from 2018 by Accelerated Concepts showed that 81% of surveyed retailers incurred an outage at least once a year. This study also revealed that 87% of retailers have to wait 4 hours for support. For Fashion Flavors, this means they could lose more than € 300.000. Imagine what this will cost if you own 1000 shops or more! In other words: improving the availability of critical technical retail technology has a very obvious business case.
What is needed here is a next generation Retail Service Management solution. In close collaboration with one of our customers, we built a prototype that ensures critical retail shop components and services are constantly monitored by ServiceNow. Our solution combines the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) and several ServiceNow modules, which are:
Leveraging ServiceNow for the retail sector has left us with a couple of valuable lessons learned that we’d like to share:
If you are a retailer who has made heavy technology investments to create the ultimate in-store shopping experience, do contact us. We can help you safeguard the availability of the technology you’ve just purchased.
Sign up to our monthly Flow@Work Exclusive newsletter to get free access to our expertise and lots of tips and tricks to make work flow on the Now® Platform.