Retail Assist Turns 18

Retail Assist had its official “coming of age” last Friday, as the business celebrated its 18th year of trading.

It’s a very significant milestone for the company, after attracting significant investment in March. With ambitious growth plans for Retail Assist, our Board of Directors (headed by Dan Smith) will take the business on to the next stage of its development.

So, what’s changed in 18 years?

Since 1999, when Retail Assist was founded, retail has evolved into a whole different proposition; technology is not just important to retailers, but the cornerstone of their operations. We have seen the relentless rise of ecommerce, the launch of click-and-collect as the poster-child for customer convenience, UK retailers going global, and key changes in approaches to the traditional bricks and mortar store (who knew they would end up becoming virtual distribution hubs for web orders through ship-from-store?)

In the face of these sector shifts, Retail Assist has adopted its services and solutions to an omnichannel world: 24 x 7 “always on” provision, software design and development to drive changes in retail operations, and supporting the “buy anything, at anytime, anywhere” principle.

We now support major clients in the hospitality sector too. As well as 8000 retail stores, we also support more than 700 restaurants, and over 90 cinemas in 66 countries across the world. Check out our industry award-winning Help Desk stats here. Compared with industry averages, we have 10% higher achievement of Service Level Agreements, 4 x more sites supported, double the number of languages spoken and 4 x more support capacity than industry average.

To celebrate our 18^th birthday, we invited clients and partners to a summer drinks event in Soho. You can see the pictures on Facebook here. Internally, all staff were presented with a bottle of fizz to enjoy over the warm weekend.

Thank you to all our clients, business partners and colleagues for all your support over the last 18 years. Looking forward to the 21st!