Service excellence goes beyond meeting expectations, and at Retail Assist we're always striving to exceed them. With some of our relationships spanning over 20 years, we’re continually adapting to our customers evolving needs and leveraging their feedback.

How do we ensure service excellence is echoed in everything we do at Retail Assist?

Kerry Hardy (Head of IT Service Delivery), Camila Cotting (Customer Assurance Manager) and Frances Thomas (Head of Customer Assurance and Client Services) give you an overview in this week’s short video.

Click here to watch the video in YouTube.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding our customers businesses, processes and operations is paramount for us. This allows us to provide tailored solutions that address our customers' unique needs and challenges.
• To consistently deliver high quality services, we adhere to industry best practice, with ISO 20000 accreditation, following the ITIL framework and holding membership with the Service Desk Institute (SDI).
• To ensure quality within our diverse teams spread across different locations, we document all our processes and procedures. We also conduct regular audits of tickets to identify areas of improvement and track progress.
• Our customers have complete visibility of their tickets. This transparency allows them to track progress without having to call us back,  have a detailed view of any issues across their estate and inform service review meetings and monthly reports.
• Our commitment to building strong relationships and a sustainable service structure has resulted in long-lasting partnerships with our customers, some of whom we have served for nearly two decades.
• Our focus on fostering a customer-centric culture, means we consistently meet and exceed the expectations of our customers.

Want to Know More?

👉 You can check out how Papa John’s is getting a slice of the Retail Assist action here.

👉 Learn more about our Customer Assurance Team here.

👉 Find out why we were a finalist for the Managed Service Provider of the Year at the Service Desk Institute Awards here.

The post Delivering Service Excellence: Our Quality Assurance Approach appeared first on Retail Assist.

Retail Assist’s award-winning IT service desk offers flexible helpdesk support to keep businesses trading. Working 24x7 365 days a year and supporting customers in 11 countries across thousands of global locations, our service offering has the industry seal of approval: winning IT Service Provider of the Year at the ITSMF Professional Service Management Awards. In our latest annual benchmarking, we’ve made an infographic detailing our key statistics from 2022.

We’re proud to highlight our headline stats:

• 2,855 sites supported
• 7,870 tills supported
• 23.79s average speed of answer
• 8,334 calls supported each month with only a 2.78% abandon rate
• 96.21% of service level agreements are achieved each month

SLAs

A key statistic identified from our annual results was the outstanding performance in relation to our service level agreements. Agreed with every customer, it is our aim to end every call to our Help Desk with a positive result, the problem solved, and a happy customer. For example, achieving 96.21% service level agreements each month.

Understanding the customer

We have created an environment within our service delivery teams which truly understands customers’ requirements. We employ analysts who have worked in the front line of retail/hospitality, and therefore understand the environments in which our customers operate, and encourage them to improve upon the specialist support provided to our customers, through intensive on-site training at some of the UK’s leading retail and hospitality brands. Actively spending time on the front-line at customer sites, the team have worked above and beyond their daily roles to deliver a more engaging service experience, by gaining a deeper understanding of how the business works. Retail Assist is an external part of the customers’ own teams, developing closer business relationships that allow the analysts to deliver a service that fits the customers’ exact needs.

Benefits of outsourcing

Outsourced retail IT services such as our 24 x 7 Help Desk offer a flexible alternative to in-house teams, and a more cost effective solution. A good Help Desk should match its support service to its customers’ trading hours. To make this possible, many businesses supplement in-house teams with outsourced resources, which offer more hours of supports and a breadth of skills that comes from using a shared service. This means that we deal with issues as and when they arise, helping drive internal processes and provide efficient restoration of service. Playing a ‘behind the scenes’ role, our Help Desk save time whilst increasing profit by delivering greater systems uptime at the point-of-service. We have the support capacity to do this with a scalable service.

Multiple language support

Hello, Bonjour, Guten Tag, Hola, Ciao, Hallo, Szia, Olá, cześć . . .

Did you know, our international Help Desk services are offered in 9 European languages, roughly double the amount of core languages offered by industry standards.

Our customers with international stores appreciate the value added by our call analysts resolving IT issues in native technical language – better relationships are developed, and a superior level of customer service is experienced by the end user. We’re proud to understand not only the customer’s technical environment, but also the cultural diversity of supporting stores in different countries. In line with our incident reduction mentality, being able to solve incidents quickly delivers greater uptime at the point of service for the customer, which saves both time and money. We have systems in place that direct customers’ calls to the highest skilled analyst. This works the same for our territory/language specialists.

Want to know more about how we could benefit your business? We currently work with leading global retail, hospitality and leisure brands, but also support logistics, and councils. Get in touch here.

The post Our IT Help Desk: Top 5 Stats appeared first on Retail Assist.

This week we chatted to the Customer Assurance team. Developed just over a year ago, we’ve created a team focused on evolving our managed services provision to meet the future needs of our customers, maintaining best practice, and going above and beyond the standard customer experience.

Proactively assessing what we could do better and how is at the core of the customer assurance team. Through detailed analysis of internal processes and external feedback, the team ensure the lifecycle of helpdesk operations adhere to best practice whilst looking at ways to increase efficiency and address gaps.

Meet the team:

Camila Cotting, Customer Improvement Manager

Fine tuning continuous improvement, Camila is focused on designing and implementing ways to futureproof our helpdesk service, collaborating with the customer and detailed internal insights to support the helpdesk team in exceeding customer expectations.

Francesco DeVivo, Incident Manager

Working closely with Lewis McManamon, our Service Desk Manager, Francesco applies the quality initiatives to management, resolution and fulfilment of all incidents across the desk, ensuring best practice is followed to the letter.

Anna Ramsay, Quality Lead

Having progressed through the helpdesk, Anna has an intricate understanding of our service. Applying her experience, she is able to identify opportunities for improvement across the helpdesk using internal assessments and trend analysis to lead continuous quality improvement.

David Thomas, Quality Coach

Often teaming up with Trisha Sheehan from the Learning and Development team, David provides the desk with regular coaching and training to ensure everyone has the tools to deliver the ultimate customer experience. Reviewing feedback to highlight both barriers and opportunities, David provides the insight to ensure every initiative developed in the customer assurance team is echoed across the desk.

Frances Thomas, Head of Client Services and Customer Assurance

Frances leads the collaboration across our customer focused teams to ensure there is a conduit between Retail Assist and our customers. Managing relationships and delivering service to the highest standard, client services and customer assurance are integral to success.

Managing over 200,000 tickets a year, the team have worked together to normalise our support, enabling the helpdesk to maintain high standards of service through fluctuations such as peak trade. Working together to provide exceptional insight, our service and our customers benefit from continuous development and future proofing, backed by an outstanding customer experience.

Want to know more? Find out why TFG Brands (London) Ltd chose to extend Retail Assist’s support to brands Phase Eight and Hobbs.

The post Meet the Team! Get to Know Customer Assurance appeared first on Retail Assist.

We recently caught up with Sam who gave us an insight into what it’s like working as a Service Delivery Lead on the Help Desk at Retail Assist and showed us what it’s really all about. Watch the interview for her top tips, what her average day looks like and to find out about her team of quizzers.

Click here to watch the video

Hi Sam! Tell us about your role at Retail Assist and how you got into service delivery?

I got my first job at age 16 in a retail store and stayed there for 9 years managing a small team. I moved on to become a customer services manager and I really found my calling for delivering a good service. I’ve been managing people for over 10 years now and I still draw on all the experience I learnt all that time ago. What attracted me to Retail Assist was the combination of working with clients and managing a team – it’s a really nice balance.

My role now is Service Delivery Lead, the main focus is to ensure my team provide the excellent service to our customers that they’re expecting and deserve. I’m heavily involved in progression too; I train and develop colleagues, starting early in the recruitment process, helping them with the skills and knowledge to progress throughout Retail Assist. Another role of mine is liaising with clients and attending monthly meetings to ensure they are happy with our team’s performance.

What’s the best thing about working for Retail Assist?

The people and my team! I love spreading the positivity and motivation, so seeing them develop right from the start, or coming in with experience to grow further and into different roles, is so rewarding. Knowing that my time and effort has allowed their skills to develop is one of the best parts about my job.

My most memorable day at Retail Assist was just as the lockdown was announced and we were given 48 hours’ notice to work from home. It was a real learning curve for us as a leadership team. The strength of our team really showed through as we packed up the offices, it was amazing how we adapted to the huge changes at Retail Assist, and it  brought so much positivity as we worked through it together.

Tell us a little more about yourself…

I have got a very active family; my stepdaughters definitely keep me busy! We like to do anything outdoors like going for walks and bike rides in the park, sunshine or rain, for hours on end, getting fresh air and having lots of fun.

My hidden talent is that I’m a bit of a secret quiz master. We have quiz time once a day with my team – it gets them motivated to have 5 minutes away from anything serious. We even have a leaderboard!

What are your tips for working on the Help Desk?

Always communicate, work together as a team, support one another, and help where you can. Generally, work hard and always try your best!

 Want to find out more about how our Help Desk works? Visit our webpage here.

The post A Day in the Life: Samantha Wilde, Service Delivery Lead appeared first on Retail Assist.

We are delighted to welcome Lewis McManamon to the Retail Assist team!

Lewis joins the Help Desk as Service Delivery Manager. This week, we caught up with him to talk about his new role, his background and what he loves about working with the Retail Assist team.

Hi Lewis! Tell us a little bit about your background.

I joined Retail Assist in December from Frasers Group. I worked there as Service Delivery Manager and previously Group IT Support Manager. At Frasers I managed seven service desks across six different locations.

What does your role entail? What does your average day look like?

So far I've been looking at how the Help Desk operates so that I can understand the processes and tools that my team use, keeping an eye out for any opportunities to improve quality and efficiencies. Day-to-day, I manage the daily operations of the Help Desk. I make sure that the Help Desk team have the correct resources to ensure service levels are met and SLAs maintained.

My team includes Service Delivery Leads and Client Lead Analysts who I make sure are happy and supported. They're all great people who already provide exceptional service levels and consistently exceed customer expectations, I'm excited to see what more they achieve!

What have you enjoyed about working at Retail Assist so far?

I've loved meeting all kinds of different people, some who are even based in different countries. Everyone has been so welcoming, and it has been such a positive experience. I was delighted with how Retail Assist overcame the challenges of virtual onboarding, I really felt like part of the team from the get-go, and I've been able to watch and understand how the desk operates as if we were in person.

What is your favourite thing about your job?

I absolutely love working with technology, so I'm really interested in finding ways to modernise existing processes and procedures, I love the challenge of finding opportunities to create an operational efficiency or ways to automate a process. I also really enjoy how busy and diverse my role is and that I get to work with such a range of different people.

We're hiring!

If you'd like to join Lewis and the team on the Help Desk, we have various vacancies available over on our careers page.

The post Welcome to the Team! Lewis McManamon joins Retail Assist appeared first on Retail Assist.

Retailers are determined to not let this year's Black Friday be overshadowed by the supply chain issues faced globally. As consumers, we're used to deals starting in early November that kick off a season of festive shopping. This year we saw more Singles Day promotions in the UK too, China's largest shopping event which was originally an "anti-valentines" promotion, now trades more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. So now we're further into 2021's golden quarter and retail is experiencing a much-needed uplift, what are some of the issues retailers should be aware of?

Cyber security tops every CTO's Christmas list

Digital growth continues to rise, heavily influenced by the pandemic. However, this has increased opportunities for cyber criminals looking to launch an attack, and has meant that retailers and consumers really need to increase their levels of protection and awareness. An article in Retail Week, cited that each attempted fraudulent purchase across ecommerce is now worth an average of 70% more than they were pre-pandemic, increasing in value from $416 (£302) in October/November 2019 to $710 (£516).

What can retailers do to prevent fraudsters from taking advantage of the increased online trading activity?

Work with a cyber security expert to ensure you are protected from the risks of a cyber-attack: we are actively working with numerous clients, not only to implement the latest in cyber security software, but to carry out training for internal staff, through phishing simulations – internal employees are often your biggest security threat.

Carry out dark web scanning: do you have data that is vulnerable, or on the dark web? How can you protect your website and credentials of employees or customer data? Our IT security model provides a dark web scanning service to prevent cyber security threats by identifying, analysing and proactively monitoring your organisation's compromised or stolen data.

Endpoint Management: it's not just online technology that's at risk - key to proactive IT estate management, endpoint management ensures that all your end devices are visible, controlled, consistent and secure. Our IT security support team have a single view of your estate, enabling them to manage alerts and updates more efficiently, keeping your critical devices protected from cyber security threats 24/7.

Don't get too distracted with the whirlwind of peak trade to let a breach slip through the net. Check out our cyber security services overview to find out how you should keep your systems and customers safe.

Managing demand on the high street

Competition for consumer spend will be even tighter this year with only 33% of consumers planning to spend on Black Friday. This is because most consumers are planning to start Christmas shopping a little earlier this year in an attempt to curb stock shortages caused by supply chain issues.

This means increased demand in-store throughout the whole period, but after nearly two years of slow footfall, you need to make sure your systems will hold up. 79% of customers refuse to queue for more than five minutes in-store before abandoning purchases. If you lose 20 buyers a day at an average purchase of £40 across 100 stores, losses can add up to £30 million a year – all because either your POS system has crashed or won't scan products at the right price.

Retail is counting on this peak trade season to increase revenue after so much uncertainty. With more shoppers planning to hit the high street in search of a sensory experience and whole new appreciation to be back out and shopping, retailers need to ensure that their in-store tech is in peak condition to enable them to trade as conveniently as possible and provide the best in-store customer experience. As such we've prepared a handy guide for retailers to download and check their in-store technology, download it here.

We work with many of the UK's leading retail and hospitality brands to keep their systems trading and work with them on pro-active measures to prevent systems from going down. If you want to speak to the experts to ensure you are able to trade at peak levels and keep your systems in check, get in touch with us at info@retail-assist.co.uk.

The post Black Friday 2021: Last Minute Retail Tips appeared first on Retail Assist.

Retail Assist Manages Latest Store Opening for Global Cosmetics Leader Morphe

We've extended support from existing first-line Help Desk services, to carry out a full store opening for global cosmetics leader, Morphe.

Morphe, part of FORMA Brands family, marks its seventh standalone UK store and very first in Wales, St David’s shopping centre.

Our store systems team stepped in to provide full ownership of the technology elements in store to enable them to open on time and within budget. The team ensured that all technical equipment was built, configured, and pre-tested ahead of time, then transported and installed into the store over a few days.

David Ford, Store Systems Supervisor, said: "This was a great and challenging project to get involved with, and took lots of careful planning and testing. All the PoS hardware was pre-configured, delivered to site and installed by Store Systems. It's a pleasure working with Amit on the new stores, and we have fine-tuned our installations based on our previous experience providing this support to Morphe. It's a vibrant store, and it's great to execute such a successful store opening."

Amit Chaba IT Operations Manager at Forma Brands continued: "This was a challenging project, but the store opening was very successful without any IT issues. We were so pleased to see the final result. Retail Assist took full ownership for the Cardiff store opening, staying on top of everything. They were so flexible to work with and I look forward to working with Retail Assist again on any store opening plans from next year when we resume."

Retail Assist has delivered first-line Help Desk support to Morphe’s stores across both the United Kingdom and North America since 2019 and have previously rolled out new stores in Australia.

The post St David’s Gets A Makeover! appeared first on Retail Assist.

Blondie famously sang about hanging on the telephone – but this wouldn’t have been the case if they’d tried to contact our IT Help Desk with our new telephony system!

Over the next few weeks, we've got some really exciting updates coming to our IT Help Desk and we can’t wait to share them. This week, we’re kicking it off with the successful migration of our first teams over to the new Hosted Teams Voice (HTV) solution, with help from our friends over at Claranet and Puzzel.

IT Help Desk Innovation

Over the last few months, our team have been looking for an alternative telephony platform for our award-winning IT Help Desk. After identifying a solution that will provide us with all of the functionality required to grow as a business, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve migrated our teams over to the new system.

Tina Hand, our Head of Systems Support, said: "Throughout this process, the team and I have been working together to look at the future needs of both Retail Assist and our clients to understand the additional functionality and requirements needed to support our growth and the future business demands. We are extremely excited to be working with industry-leading Claranet to provide their Hosted Teams Voice and Puzzel Hosted Contact Centre solutions. We are all really looking forward to the new features our IT Help Desk teams will be able use, along with the additional benefits we will be able to offer to our existing and new clients, too.”

At Retail Assist, we pride ourselves on continuous innovation: the tech world never stands still and we constantly reassess the service we provide to our customers.

Dan Smith, our CEO, said: “We know the importance of re-investing in our services to be ahead of the future needs of our clients. The choice in industry-leading Claranet’s Hosted Team Voice and Puzzel’s Hosted Contact Centre to seamlessly engage our IT Help Desk analysts across voice, email, social media, SMS, with those at the front line of our client teams was an obvious choice.”

Kevin Greathead, our Chief Services Officer, added: "We are constantly looking for ways to improve our service offerings by introducing new technology and working with innovative service providers. We have selected Claranet to introduce their Hosted Teams Voice platform and Puzzel Hosted Contact Centre solutions as these are key tools to improve the efficiency of our 24x7x365 multi-lingual IT Help Desk team. We have linked the Contact Centre solution to our ITSM tool to create a single point of service for all of our customers and we look forward to using these new solutions.”

Keep your eyes peeled for more updates as we continue to invest in our services to meet the needs of our customers, now and in the years to come. Subscribe to our blogs here to make sure you never miss an update.

The post Hotline Bling! We Invest in Our IT Help Desk’s New Telephony System appeared first on Retail Assist.

Is your business growing faster than your IT can handle?

A well-managed, efficient and slick IT Help Desk service acts as so much more than an IT function. By the very nature of the service, users contacting a Help Desk will be experiencing problems or issues, and may often be stressed, or frustrated. Having their issues quickly and professionally dealt with can have a huge impact on individual satisfaction and productivity, and sends out an image of the brand taking a professional and serious approach to problems, without disrupting customer service.

What can cause problems for a Help Desk?

Meeting expectations on levels of service can often be difficult when faced with the challenges encountered on a busy service desk. Response times can be seriously impacted by a lack of efficiency or inappropriate focus. Many service desks will look at their initial response times as a focal point, aiming to provide a rapid answering time. This can often result in positive first impressions that may well not be followed through to a successful end result, due to focus being misplaced. A high first line fix means much more than a low answering time with longer resolution.

Problems can also arise around creating a cost effective approach, where sufficient financial priority is placed on the areas and timeslots that matter or are subject to enhanced demand.

Managing this can of course be difficult, and can be subject to many types of internal pressure, not least of which can form around how to calculate the worth of individual components to the business as a whole. Gauging issues based on their priority can also be difficult and time consuming, as well as escalation to the relevant third parties. 

How can Retail Assist help?

The specialist Help Desk team at Retail Assist offers services designed to make a business more effective, by providing a streamlined approach to issues. By centralising all problems to one single point of contact, any incident that occurs across an entire business can be logged and resolved in the same place, creating a uniformed and unified service. As the service blends seamlessly with internal teams, the IT Help Desk forms an extension of the business, where problems are managed end-to-end from the point of contact to resolution.

The financial benefits to the business are very valuable. The service removes the need for staffing internally, such as the ability to flex cover over peak periods, and all costs are transparent. Regular meetings with users of the IT Help Desk service mean that improvements are continually made in order to align with expectations.

In a similar manner, a proactive approach is taken to the incidents about which the IT Help Desk is contacted in order to prevent occurrences of issues in the future. As a result the top issues that the IT Help Desk encounters each month are collected, assessed and removed in order to reduce the volume of incidents that may occur.

Retail Assist’s IT Help Desk service is ISO 20000 accredited, follows the ITIL framework and holds membership of the Service Desk Institute (SDI): assurance is provided in terms of quality best practice as well as effectiveness. 20 years of experience within the retail and hospitality sector means that the understanding of technology Retail Assist possesses is unparalleled. Cover is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a variety of languages, in recognition of the fact that IT Help Desk support needs to reflect the demands of modern global business.

If you're interested in outsourcing any of your IT requirements, get in touch here. 

The post Managing Help Desk Demand appeared first on Retail Assist.

We’re so thrilled to announce that Tina Hand, our Head of Systems Support, has been confirmed as a finalist at the national Women in Tech Excellence Awards. Run by Computing, the fourth annual Women in Tech Excellence Awards will take place virtually.

Last year, Tina won the ‘Empowering Potential Leader’ at the East Midlands Leadership Awards and this she’s listed as a finalist for ‘IT Leader of the Year’. In less than three years that she’s worked here, she’s re-developed our Help Desk structure to create new roles, which allowed for better progression opportunities, and also implemented a pay progression scheme for the Help Desk team, whilst constantly driving and achieving consistently high SLAs for our customers.

Tina said: “I’m so pleased to be a finalist for the Women in Tech Excellence Awards. As anyone who’s worked with me will know, I’m not keen on talking about myself so it’s amazing to be nominated by the Retail Assist team. Whilst my role is focused on strategy and service delivery, culture is so important to me and I had a very clear vision in how I wanted our Help Desk culture to be for the people working on it. My people are my main motivation and I like to ensure that my team are supported, developed and encouraged to grow, especially whilst we’re all currently working from home. I’d like to thank everyone for all of their support and will keep my fingers crossed for the 1st December!”

After receiving over 800 nominations, the Women in Tech Excellence judges put together a shortlist of the top performers in the tech industry. Joining Tina as finalists include representatives from companies such as Arsenal Football Club and HSBC, with the winners being announced on Tuesday 1st December at a virtual ceremony.

Dan Smith, our CEO, said: “We’ve always said that our team is our greatest asset and we’re immensely proud not only of the work that Tina delivers every day, but also that she has been recognised nationally for her talent as an IT leader. Tina is passionate, focused and always calm under pressure: she’s a complete asset to our company and to our customers, and she’s already a winner in our eyes.”

A statement from the Women in Tech Excellence Awards said: “Although we are facing huge challenges in our personal and professional lives as we cope with the impact of Covid-19, Computing is committed to continuing to champion greater diversity in the technology industry for the long term. Our Women in Tech Excellence Awards (formerly Women in IT Excellence Awards) are important as they recognise top-performing women from across the technology space and provide inspiration for younger women looking to build a career in our industry. Now in its fourth year, we have taken the decision to rename the awards to bring them closer to our hugely successful Women in Tech Festival, which last year brought hundreds of people together to discuss diversity, celebrate success and network with the best and brightest minds in the industry.”

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