31/08/2016

How to improve customer experience by giving time back to restaurant and retail managers

Restaurant and retail managers should be focusing on improving customer satisfaction and employee relations — not administrating information in the back office. Here’s how it’s done.

Stuck in the back office

Life for restaurant or retail managers in an organisation which still uses outdated legacy systems is tough. It involves manual processes, like back-and-forth emails, faxes and multiple calls to centralised support desks. All this keeps managers locked away administrating information in the back office; it keeps them away from the customers out front; it stops them from focusing on improving customer satisfaction. They also feel like they’re not really listened to — and no-one likes that. Employee engagement plummets, which everyone knows is expensive.

Locked into ‘snailware’ systems

With dated legacy incident-tracking systems, some more than a decade old, making changes to databases is laborious. Businesses across the UK are locked into these ‘snailware’ systems. The inflexibility makes it harder for big restaurant and retail chains to understand their SLAs and their own needs and measuring the concerns of their end users.

All this makes incident tracking, reporting and auditing even more laborious, which restricts the business from innovating — the system doesn’t address their needs and is unable to easily evolve with the business (without loads of time, effort and cost to update). It just holds them back — it’s like being frozen inside a cement block.

Breaking the cement freeze — giving power back to the managers

With ServiceNow, efficiency and end-user experience is transformed, thanks to self-service app interfaces within an umbrella platform. At retail store or restaurant level the manager can put information straight into ServiceNow via electronic forms which are categorised and presented in a catalogue-style interface.

With automated follow up they can track where they are and see what’s needed on the fly. They only need to make requests to head office once, and they can send/receive feedback in real-time.

By making the end-user experience better, managers feel empowered. By taking away manual processes, they get their time back.

At head office level, the integrated knowledge base inside ServiceNow’s HR Service Automation application is populated with corporate-specific HR information including policies, benefits, travel and expenses, job openings, and training. A self-service catalog then presents this information to employees with out-of-the-box, request-fulfill process automation. Requests submitted through the catalog are then automatically assigned to the right person to be fulfilled.

Cutting out the confusion

ServiceNow minimises back-and-forth conversations between the restaurant and retail managers and their respective head office teams, which simplifies communication with field workers. The Cloud-based platform takes confusion out of the communication process from end-to-end. The store/restaurant manager asks something once and tracks the status in real time, instead of feeling lost while they wait for an email or phone call.

This means managers can spend their time doing more of the good stuff: paying attention to customers and staff.

It’s not just at store level that the savings are made. By streamlining processes like these across scores of restaurants or retail stores, efficiency soars across the whole business. Time and money is saved by facilities teams at head office by using the same system to manage maintenance, repairs and checks at multiple premises. And, because every conversation, case and query is logged digitally, and centrally, it makes the whole system more accountable, measurable, transparent and visible.

Read about how ServiceNow goes beyond IT and streamlines the whole enterprise, from risk management to real estate and HR to marketing.

Managed IT Services, ServiceNow
About Technosys

Technosys deliver expert IT Service Management consultancy services to both small and large enterprises across EMEA. As a partner with ServiceNow and BMC, market leaders in the ITSM industry, Technosys are able to offer best in class solutions to all clients and ensure a successful implementation as well as unparalleled support.

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