The Key to Keeping Your Retail Stores Online

Retail is a sector that increasingly requires cutting edge technology. Whether shoppers purchase online or in-store, a good, organised point-of-sale system keeps your store functioning seamlessly. Ideally, all aspects of retail- supply chain, distribution, inventory management, HR, sales and marketing must be supported by an IT deck. According to this research, a 1-hour down time in Amazon on Prime Day caused a loss of 75–99 million USD in lost sales. This clearly demonstrates the need for businesses to be able to respond to and resolve issues in real time.

The rise of e-commerce has led to the expectation of 24/7 service by the customers. Any technology disruptions or degradation have a large impact on customers. Rather than wait the glitch out, customers flock to the competitors with similar service and a functioning system. The number of minutes your service is down is directly proportional to revenue losses.

How effectively an organization can both and avoid issues — in addition to mitigating, responding to, and handling issues when they do occur — can mean the difference between having happy customers versus no customers. This is where the ability to work real time really matters. We bring to you some ways in which organizations can help improve real time incident resolution:

1. Automation

For organizations to be able to function well over the long run, they must be able to identify, and resolve most (if not all) of their issues before they affect customers. Automation must be heavily integrated with all systems at all stages of operations. Automating your systems and alerts means that responders are on top of anything that goes wrong (or is about to go wrong), and they can collaborate and resolve it quickly and efficiently. Check out the Freshdesk integration by Xurrent IMR, that can help you track, resolve and analyse your tickets from a centralized hub.

2. Established Protocols

When customers report issues, companies often don’t have processes around responding to these issues. First-line responders must be fully empowered with knowledge and authority to resolve current issues and resolve future ones. Response processes should be well defined, coordinated, and leverage automation as much as possible to reduce manual work, enabling employees to spend more time on innovation.

3. Learning from past incidents

Organizations should learn from past issues, which should be automatically documented and made available, and improvements quickly implemented. Teams should complete postmortems majority of incidents and complete follow-up tasks, taking full advantage of the opportunity to learn from incidents — and taking steps to implement improvements that can help reduce the risk of the same incidents from recurring.

4. Taking care of on-call engineers

Being on call can have a major negative impact on on-call responders’ happiness, both at work and in their personal lives. Responders can be interrupted by calls waking them up at night and pulling them away from important family events — and what makes it even worse is when they find out that many of the alerts are unactionable anyway, either due to lack of information or false alarms. The risk of burnout for on-call responders is very real, resulting in high turnover and the loss of highly skilled technical employees for organizations — which can mean even slower response times and more unhappy customers when incidents arise.