Vue Entertainment outsources IT Support & Service Management to Retail Assist

Vue Entertainment , one of the UK’s premier cinema chains, has outsourced the management of user support and technical service management in its head office and across its 69-strong cinema estate to Retail Assist. It is a milestone for Retail Assist, marking the company’s entry into the leisure sector.

Vue employs 3,000 staff, including 100 at its head office. The objective was to establish a single point of contact across the business for everything IT related, and to formalise all elements of service management by means of structured processes and procedures.

Observes Vue Entertainment’s IT Director, Roland Jones: “This new partnership with Retail Assist means our staff will no longer need to think about who they need to call for what. With just one team owning all calls, we can look forward to faster problem resolution and better communication.”

Prior to engaging the services of Retail Assist, Vue used a third party for 1st-line user support of its Vista software solution whilst support for other IT systems was provided inhouse. Support services needed to be streamlined, both to reflect Vue’s increased reliance upon IT and to optimise the cost-effectiveness of the operation.

The decision was made to put both elements of service management out to tender; a process from which Retail Assist emerged as winner. “We couldn’t help but be impressed by Retail Assist’s Help Desk. They are used to supporting some of the UK’s largest retail businesses,” continues Roland Jones. “We also liked their professionalism, energy and enthusiasm.”

Retail Assist pulled out all the stops to get the new service up and running speedily. It achieved this in just 5 weeks after securing the contract, well in time to support Vue’s peak trading over the Christmas holiday period.

Retail Assist is providing a Retail Service Desk service between 9am and 12am, 364 days a year, covering 1st-line support and incident management. It is also delivering a full IT service management function encompassing problems, service levels and knowledge, together with service asset and configuration management.

Retail Assist is the channel for all IT support across the Vue business, and is also assisting in the day-to-day management of third-party suppliers and their service level agreements.

Retail Assist owns all support calls until resolution. Using its specialist Retail Service Desk technology, it provides full visibility of support calls, manages required changes and liaises with internal or external teams providing 2nd-line and 3rd-line support for specific hardware, software and services.

Retail Assist’s Managed Services Director, Dan Smith, carries ultimate accountability for the success of the new relationship. Excited to see the company move into the leisure sector for the first time, he states: “The critical success factors of this new relationship will be to use our experience to drive down call volumes and fix as many problems as possible at 1st-line. We need to provide Vue with management information that will enable it to more easily manage IT operations across a large and geographically diverse business.”