The 10 Million Mark! Our Operations Support Checks Hit 8 Figures

Written by Anna Murphy, Communications Lead

Insurance: you don’t always appreciate it until something goes wrong. However, what if your insurance policy could predict and then stop issues before they had even happened? When it comes to our retail IT operations team, they’ve got everything covered.

This week, we were absolutely delighted when our IT operations team hit a huge milestone mark, having completed 10,000,000 checks on our customers’ systems to ensure that their systems could trade as usual – as if nothing had happened…

Dan Smith, our CEO, said: “We’re absolutely thrilled to have hit this huge number of checks across our client base and we’re also very proud of our teams for supporting this. Over our 21 years of providing IT support and solutions to our customers, we’ve always believed in offering proactive help. Retail Assist’s culture focuses on continuous improvement and that has prevented the potential interruption of these incidents even happening.”

Check It Out

Jan Benjamin, our Operations and Compliance Manager, explained: “We run many different checks! We use various tools, as well as completing manual checks of devices for CPU, disk usage and for various services and interfaces, hardware errors, application monitoring, checking that jobs are present and running when they should be, application errors, overnight schedule monitoring and run times, Ra-X interface monitoring, back-ups, escalating failures, ensuring that tapes are sent offsite, ensuring that tapes are loaded as required, network monitoring… We’ve always believed in proactive monitoring and checking to pick up on issues early; a lot of what we do stops things going wrong in the first place so that it doesn’t become a wider incident.

“If our checks do raise concerns, we have many processes in place that will see us escalate issues in a timely fashion – no matter what time of day or day of the year – to ensure minimum disruption to our customers’ service. We also escalate issues to our customers’ internal teams, to the appropriate Retail Assist teams and to any relevant 3rd parties. The escalation of key system availability happens at agreed times and we are continually reviewing and building on our checks and processes to ensure they are fit for purpose. We’re also always learning from experience.

“In fact, a lot has changed over Retail Assist’s 21 years. We now have automated checks in place for certain systems; this means that checks are done more regularly, which allows us to pick up on problems even faster. We also now use online checklists that flag to our operators all checks to be completed to ensure we never get behind or miss anything. More and more of our clients are working with increasingly diverse systems, which we’ve had to learn and adapt to using, including changes to our call logging system and the way we can manage and report on incidents.”

What about our Help Desk?

Well, it’s not just our IT operations team who have got big news to celebrate as our Help Desk team are hot on their heels. With the 3,000,000^th incident predicted to occur in the next four weeks, we’ve already started to wonder which of our customers it will turn out to be… We’ll be announcing the 3 millionth incident through to our IT Help Desk very soon!

Do you feel like your operations are lacking an insurance policy? Get in touch here to find out how we can help.