I'm always overwhelmed whenever I walk into a Home Depot. Not because I'm not a handyman. I'm not too shabby with power tools, and I know my light bulbs given my experience in the clean energy industry.
No, it's the kitchen and bath section. That place is scary! I can remember being a kid and spending hours at one of those stores watching my parents and a sales rep try to make sense of the mess that is custom home furnishing.
Makes me glad I still rent.
However, one leading retailer is doing some pretty impressive things with modern technology to help transform the customer experience.
John Lewis, the largest department store retailer in the UK, recently took the first steps towards modernizing these efforts by deploying their "Customer Project Management" (CPM) application. Using the Appian Cloud solution, CPM allows John Lewis employees (called Partners in the co-owned business) to accelerate how customer orders are managed and fulfilled for Fitted Kitchens, Floor Coverings and Made to Measure Curtains and Blinds. This new solution is part of the John Lewis ambition to further improve and optimize the customer journey through digitization, automation, data and analytics.
John Lewis Partners are able to use Appian to manage customer case specifications and communicate case status in order to create a more seamless customer experience. The full lifecycle of the sale and delivery is monitored and can be changed to take account of customer requirements and internal priorities.
"With Appian our Partners can make each customer interaction more effective and productive, access the right data, and the whole process is visible at every stage of the customer journey," said Mark Fishman, Project Manager, Retail Operations Development, John Lewis. "This supports our Omni-Channel aspirations and is all about: smarter decisions, faster action, and more transparency to deliver the best customer experience."
This commitment to customer service excellence goes a step further, as events such as home inspections, contractor fulfilment, and final case wrap up are all handled through the Appian application. Every order becomes a new component of the customer's record.
This allows Appian to not only accelerate the process and ensure quality, but also provide meaningful collaborative feedback on analytics of the overall customer experience for trend analysis.
In the crowded world of retail, it's important for retailers to gain a competitive edge while maintaining customer satisfaction. A modern Work Platformcreates business advantage with processes from financial operations to warehousing and order management systems.
Retail is not an area where most would expect to see BPM have a significant industry play. More often than not, when examining the industries most heavily-rooted in modern technology, we tend to think of examples such as portfolio and risk management for financial services, or claims and case management in the insurance industry.
Appian workplace technologies are helping some of the world's leading retailers address a number of critical business areas related to:
- Automating financial processes to maximize profit, reduce errors and ease compliance burdens
- Increasing marketing and promotion effectiveness
- Tracking customer service and satisfaction with real-time performance metrics
- Managing the supply chain and enhance back office operations
"Critical to the Retail Industry is maintaining the customer experience while constantly enhancing the quality of service being offered," said Vikki Hailey, Regional Vice President, UK & Ireland, Appian. "Knowing your customers and making smarter decisions based on the knowledge and data gathered is also key and forever evolving."
Mike Ingrisano
Media Relations Manager
Mike Ingrisano
