In today’s world, brick & mortar retailers are under significant pressure and struggling to do more with less. As we wrote about in our white paper – “Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are Driving Economic and Business Recovery, But Is the Retail Sector Behind in Adoption?” –  retail leaders are focused on weathering the impact of the current inflationary environment yet are balancing that priority with reducing Level of Effort (LOE) in stores to ensure staff spend more time selling, making sure stores are executing planograms accurately via a ‘realogram’, and having the right products at the right stores to target the right customers.

Within this high pressure, high stakes environment, those in the retail industry are hyper focused on operational efficiencies in ways they’ve never been before.  One of the pain points that has plagued brick & mortar retailers to date and has consumed a significant amount of resources is ticketing and issues management. While addressing tickets submitted has historically been inefficient and resource heavy for managers and HQ, brand leaders know that effectively managing issues and resolving tickets submitted by stores is critical for keeping locations looking and performing their best, and ensuring compliance at the store level. 

Working closely with retailers to understand and address their pain points, retail management platform Optimum Retailing (OR) is changing the way brick & mortar retailers deal with tickets submitted at the store level while transforming and strengthening brick & mortar retail operations and communication. 

Our proprietary ticketing triage process allows OR to confirm if there is in fact an issue, and if there is deemed to be an issue, the platform routes it to the appropriate party rather than a general mailbox. For example, when a store submits a ticket, it receives a notification from OR and may be asked to confirm relevant things such as if the display is down, and if so, prompts them to try to restart the modem and the screen. If the issues persist, then OR will allow the store to open a ticket based on the triage results. In the event the modem seems to work but the display does not, a ticket will be generated and pushed to the appropriate team or person. However, if the issue is with the network, OR can push a notification to a third-party vendor to investigate the issue.

The ticketing triage platform features provide significant benefits for both HQ and stores, including: 

• Time saved through efficiencies and relevancy.  HQ employees receive notifications only for those tickets that required their attention and that are relevant to them.
• Improved store performance. HQ staff and retail leaders see tickets resolved much quicker, which improves store performance. 
• Data-driven trends and insights. OR goes above and beyond competitors that provide ticketing triage by using data from tickets submitted to identify trends that have the potential to inform business strategy and decision making. For example, perhaps a new material is being used for display posters and it is resulting in more tickets being submitted than usual, prompting HQ to look into the issue and identify if there is a quality control issue with the paper. The insights that can be gleaned from reports run on ticketing trends are broad and can include everything from insights into a particularly high number of issues at a certain store, to insights into rates of stolen items from certain displays or from a specific area of a store, leading to more informed security measures being put in place. 

• Empowered associates. Empowered to solve issues on their own through the system, often resulting in successful resolution without a ticket being submitted.  
• Quicker and more efficient resolution of issues. If an issue does need to be escalated, it is managed and resolved quickly to reduce overall level of effort (LOE) while allowing associates to do what they do best and focus their time and energy on retail execution, compliance, customer engagement and sales conversion.  
• Improved visibility at the store level. When a ticket is submitted through OR, it is saved on the fixtures itself in the system which improves visibility across teams – an important benefit given the nature of shift work in stores. For example, if a ticket is initiated in the morning but a new associate starts in the afternoon, that associate can see that a ticket was submitted which reduces the potential for confusion and extra work. 

The OR team is constantly looking at ways to improve platform features available to our clients, to find efficiencies that save brick & mortar retailers time and money, and to improve communication between our clients’ stores and HQ across various types of communication including announcements, calendar events, surveys, and tasks. We pride ourselves on collaborative partnerships with our clients, and as we wrote about here, recent triage upgrades to our platform resulted from our strong relationship with our client Verizon. While Verizon’s stores loved that the former ticketing tool in OR allowed them to quickly open a ticket for issues ranging from print issues to missing keys, all tickets went into one of two mailboxes – ’general maintenance’ or ‘issues’. HQ quickly realized that many of the tickets weren’t true issues or not enough information was included for them to be properly resolved, leading to platform improvements and the customized ticketing triage feature now used across OR’s client base. Our solution greatly reduces the volume of tickets by routing tickets to the appropriate parties with the escalation when needed; reduces the number of new tickets as stores are encouraged to resolve any issues they may have through the OR platform; and increases the number of tickets closed since issues are clearly outlined and directed to the correct person or team. 

OR is simplifying communication and improving ticket resolution for the world’s leading retailers.  By providing an initial layer of response and trouble shooting, OR successfully manages a significant number of tickets without involving HQ while ensuring that issues captured by OR are tracked and escalated if they are not responded to in the designated timelines determined by the KPIs set by our clients. Strategic triaging is just one of the many ways we work in partnership with our client to drive their business forward.

Get OR and its personalized platform features working for your business today.