Customer Success in the Retail Sector - It’s All in the Listening

Source: https://www.voss-solutions.com/news/blog/2019/customer-success-in-the-retail-sector/
Author: Rob Hamlin, Director Solutions Engineering at VOSS
It is a given in most technology fields that if you task 25
engineers to work towards a result, you will see at least 10 unique approaches
emerge in order to achieve that same goal. When looking to introduce automation
by deploying UC management tools, this is an important factor in the early days
of any technical engagement. When interacting with customer engineers in the
enterprise/retail verticals, I find that the reality of approach is very much
coupled with a sense of personal pride in the individual engineer’s program. It
is easy for the technical engineers to disengage if there is a hint of
criticism of any given approach. At the end of the day, who am I to judge any
given approach? That is a core value I carry in all customer engagements. I
believe that an integration engineer representing the management tool vendor
must work diligently to mesh their own solutions into the existing business
process and architecture to add the most real value. At times, technical people
can lose sight of the fact that whoever came before them did everything for a
good reason.
Unlike other business verticals where the top-to-bottom
solution is generally defined, like in a service provider environment when a
standard cloud-based solution is being provided, generally speaking, enterprise
solutions are a result of years of different engineers applying their own
approach which were best-practice at a given time. Unravelling the years of
different methodologies can be a challenge and potentially counterproductive.
When I take an objective look at the tool sets that VOSS
provides out of the box, it can be difficult to simply overlay those tools into
a customer’s existing business process. And there is often a conflict where the
business owners demand optimisation and automation, but forbid change to the
end user experience or process. To achieve success in these kinds of
environments, engagement with the customer to understand their business process
is critical, so that the management and automation tools can be configured and adapted
to fill those gaps in process and augment what is already there. This is one of
the most important phases in the work to deploy in a proof of concept or beta
in a given enterprise.
I believe there is no such thing as wasted time in my area
of work. No matter how lengthy conversations with customers can be, I have
found down the road those conversations pay off in understanding exactly how a
given group of UC engineers maintain their infrastructure. A great example is
VOSS-4-UC in the retail vertical. At several customers recently, I have
examined the factors that make a retail deployment different to a generic
enterprise deployment. In retail specifically, I have learned that there is a
drive to standardisation. In several retail deployments I have studied, the
engineers work to deploy the retail locations as “cookie cutter”, in order to
achieve deployment and operational efficiencies. It is a truth for these
engineers that the more unique retail locations become, the harder that chain
is to maintain; which ultimately leads to much longer deployment cycles in the
instances of a “net new build” retail location.
In all of the retail deployments that I have engaged with,
a retail location can vary dramatically in size; for example, a site’s
footprint might encompass 20 end phone devices and then another location might
have a footprint with hundreds of devices. The back end data that is necessary
to deploy UC services in this environment is generally static. Imagine having
25 retail locations all with one telephone at the customer service desk. The
only unique attribute about the phone across the chain is where it sits
physically. All of the other information like caller ID, labels, and general
configuration are all very static across the chain for that one station.
This data requires the flexibility to be changed, but it is
very static. This fact opens the door to a new approach in deployment to ease
standardisation. In these instances, I have introduced a new mechanism to store
retail data within VOSS-4-UC so that the static table can be accessed
repeatedly to deploy the retail location as a template. This approach enables
the retail-focused engineer to deploy a new retail location not only with much
greater speed but with greater accuracy. Where there was unique data applied to
the station, we use the standard VOSS-4-UC macros to build those custom values
dynamically. One retailer that used this input method grew to encompass over
300 end stations, which is the definition of their largest retail location.
Using the newly developed deployment tool set to deploy
retail locations with all of the other built-in features of VOSS-4-UC, retail
engineers have been able to accelerate work that historically took weeks to
complete, to now taking approximately 32 minutes, by working directly in the UC
applications. The cost and manpower savings are meaningful to the business
owners but I find that the reduction in the monotonous work of deploying the
same UC data over and over again is most appreciated by the UC engineers on the
ground.
The fundamental key to success in these retail engagements is to gain a deep understanding of what the UC engineers deploy in steady state today, and work through the business process that drives the deployment model. By understanding a company’s process there is the highest probability of embedding VOSS-4-UC successfully, and giving the UC engineer the ability to shed the work which is often times seen as a nuisance. In tandem, this gives the business owner a repeatable / efficient process that reduces overhead costs of time and manpower and increases the speed of deployments.
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