Troy Baldwin, Product Management Director. Compucom

This team has done a phenomenal job assisting the stores and keeping a positive attitude. It is truly a pleasure working with a team who knows what they are doing and are willing to jump in and help each other out. We still have a way to go, but I wanted to make sure their work did not go unnoticed. It's attitudes like this that make projects enjoyable and run smoothly.

For those in the retail industry, the pace of change is never-ending. Consumers want the latest and greatest in convenience and technology, and they want it now. The trick is in balancing the need for digital transformation with customer experience (CX) and digital employee experience (DEX). When you get this right, the sky is the limit.

At Compucom, we use our over 35 years in the managed IT services business to deliver our customers a wide range of services and solutions across nearly every industry. From workplace technology and digital support to endpoint and device lifecycle services, we have our customers covered and have helped them drive successful digital transformation initiatives. Here are just a few of our retail success stories.

Digital transformation can take many forms and often relies on many moving parts. One major part is field support, keeping devices running so your customers have the best in-store experience possible. One of our current retail customers was having issues with their previous provider being reactive instead of proactive.

As the customer shared, “We were just another ticket in somebody's queue — with no sense of urgency.” There were numerous stories of consumers walking out because of inadequate service.

We brought in a unique service model of proactive, dedicated techs with standard routes. Each store is visited weekly, enabling preventative maintenance. The technicians have three primary responsibilities:

• Break/fix
• Preventative maintenance
• Project work

Focusing on preventative maintenance has paved the way for digital transformation initiatives as needed. By providing this retailer with a field IT department without the cost of full-time employees, we have become what the customer calls a “strategic partner” in delivering services.

Since this model can be scaled up or down, it allows for adjustments during peak seasons. This approach has freed store personnel to focus on their customers and streamlined processes through vendor consolidation, dramatically decreasing the number of incidents and downtime.

While there has been a significant push to move all things to digital, in the case of print, sometimes you can't quit cold turkey. Within key corporate lines of business, the printed page still carries weight and is very much needed. That's where a managed services provider can help.

Our customer, a well-known retail brand, wanted to reduce printing costs at its headquarters, which relied on second-tier printers at user workstations. Without a centralized strategy, each department made printer purchases and supply decisions with in-house, as-available support.

This digital transformation initiative required investing in a new corporate printing infrastructure to save money and increase staff productivity. With our managed print services (MPS) solution, we replaced old equipment with state-of-the-art printing devices, deploying an automated monitoring system with security management features to promote preventative maintenance and security.

The MPS solution dramatically improved operational printing performance and reduced operating costs by an estimated $275K annually. Card-swipe authentication on printers and timed automatic purges for print jobs introduced sustainability benefits by decreasing abandoned print jobs.

The customer said, "Preventative maintenance and monitoring help us keep the downtime low for printers, making the overall support process more seamless.” And user experience has improved because of reduced printer downtime and a drastic reduction in user-opened tickets.

When discussing enabling true digital transformation, one word often mentioned is “choice.” One of the great things about being an existing strategic partner with this large niche retail customer is that we were already knowledgeable about their business and what could be done to help improve the experience for their associates and customers.

Our existing presence and their trust in our IT expertise helped when they required a refresh of the network infrastructure in approximately 2,500 stores. More recently, we created a self-service support model for their store employees.

In addition to field support and equipment refreshes, we now provide choices in how employees receive support. They can now easily access self-help options, phone support, email, and digital assistance. We helped drive adoption by collaborating with the customer to promote the service and positioned cost variables so that the customer would see overall cost reductions, along with service improvements.

The results speak for themselves – tickets handled through self-service increased by 200%, reducing calls to the service desk and overall wait times – with the customer seeing a reduction of 25% in the cost per ticket. An IT project lead for the customer said, “This team has done a phenomenal job assisting the stores and keeping a positive attitude. It is truly a pleasure working with a team who knows what they are doing and are willing to jump in and help each other out. We still have a way to go, but I wanted to make sure their work did not go unnoticed. It's attitudes like this that make projects enjoyable and run smoothly.”

About Compucom

At Compucom, we power the digital workplace. As a proven industry leader in managed IT services, we enable our customers to run resilient digital organizations ready to pivot and adapt to whatever the workplace demands next. We serve some of the world's most successful enterprise organizations, including 5 of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies. With nearly 6,000 associates, our extensive network enables us to deliver unmatched service coverage and better customer experiences across North America. Learn more at compucom.com.