Breaking the ITSM Replacement Cycle: Why this Online Retailer has been Loving assyst for 15 Years

6 min read

02-Feb-2021 13:30:00

In 2005, we helped them transform from catalog shopping to pure-play digital business. Today, they're the UK's leading online retail group—and assyst is still helping them innovate.

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Customer Profile

Online shopping group with multiple retail brands
Annual sales of £2 billion
4,000 employees
Over 60% of sales come from mobile devices

Challenges

Since, the mid-2000s, online retail in the UK has grown from 3% to 30% of total retail spend. In 2020 alone, online retail spend has grown by 20%. The ability to shop by web and mobile is now a consumer expectation. Retailers that have an online presence get the business. Those that don't, miss out.

In online retail, quality of the customer experience (CX) matters. Every aspect of the experience needs to be friction-free because competitors are just a click away. If you have the best online experience (and it works every time) customers come back. When it doesn't work, you lose the sale (and perhaps the customer) to a competitor. That's why online retailers need a combination of stability and innovation: offering the best digital experience requires constant innovation—yet the best customer experience turns into the worst customer experience if the service is offline when the customer wants it.

In 2005, our client began their digital transformation from a mail order and telephone business model to a pure-play digital retail experience. They needed to develop a new portfolio of digital retail services and a new IT infrastructure to support it—with high availability as a priority. But their old ITSM solution was standing in the way.

Our highly manual, cumbersome processes needed a more efficient, practical solution.

Retail Client

They needed a modern ITSM platform that would help them design, deploy, and manage a new portfolio of services to execute on their new digital business strategy. Our assyst ITSM solution was selected for flexibility and ease of use.

In the short term, assyst gave them the technology they needed to facilitate rapid transformation. And in the long term, its flexibility has helped them continually adapt to changing customer expectations and market conditions.

Business Aligned IT with Service Portfolio Management

As a retail group with many sub-brands, they needed to create and operate a "portfolio of portfolios", with a degree of separation between brands, yet tying them together for maximum efficiency and value for money. Only assyst with its advanced service portfolio management could let them manage multiple distinct brands and their related digital services under one roof.

Now, the client provides superior digital retail experiences across all their brands, supported by an always-on service infrastructure that supports hundreds of purchases every minute.

We work with our clients to get more out of service management...not just solving issues when things go wrong but also building and executing a vision of what IT can do to change the game for employees and customers. In the digital age, technology is at the heart of everything—but services are the vehicle for employee productivity and customer value. We help clients get both views and make sure they're aligned to eliminate waste and get more done.

Markos Symeonides, Regional CEO, Axios Systems

MORE ABOUT SERVICE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Transforming the Employee Support Experience

Before implementing assyst, employees logged issues through a clunky Intranet portal. Behind the scenes, issues were managed manually with spreadsheets. It was a system which couldn't scale to a growing volume of incidents, and issues were getting lost "in a black hole".

With assyst, they were able to quickly launch a new support portal where employees could flag incidents, find self-solve solutions quickly, and suggest improvements to the customer experience—with all incidents and suggestions under controlled management. With workloads under proper management, IT people were getting more done.

We were very pleased with how easy it was to integrate knowledge management and we noticed the benefits almost instantly.

Retail Client

self service

assyst gives you the visibility you need to manage every aspect of IT services and the service experience

Breaking out of the 3-5 year Replacement Cycle

If you still think it’s necessary to switch ITSM platforms every 3-5 years…think again. It doesn’t have to be that way. Axios Systems continues to buck the trend and keep customers happy for 10, 15, 20 years and more.

Why? Because assyst is designed for easy upgrade so that our customers can get upgrade to the latest release in hours, not months. Built as a single ITSM app with one architecture and one database, assyst avoids the stress usually associated with managing and upgrading a legacy ITSM framework built out of a patchwork of acquired technologies.

With assyst, you get more ready-to-go technology out-of-the-box—features which flex to your organization's requirements based on codeless configuration and drag-and-drop process design. That means our customers don't need to spend time and money developing customizations which are expensive to maintain and add complexity to the upgrade process.

Our assyst solution is designed for simplicity. Many ITSM platforms (especially legacy vendors) don't pay attention to the application management overheads. We do. We guarantee a quick and seamless upgrade path, every time—with all customizations carried forward automatically. It's enterprise-class ITSM technology but without the stress. We make it easy for customers to get the latest ITSM technology. That's why customers stay with assyst longer than other ITSM vendors.

Results

	Always-on services mean no interruption to revenue
	500 service improvements applied in the first 18 months, creating savings of $5 million
	Significant reduction in support calls, creating further savings of $500K in the first 18 months
	$2 million saved through process automation
	20% increase in employee engagement scores
	Flexible ITSM platform supports the continual transformation they need to stay ahead in the market
	Quick and easy upgrades give the customer seamless access to the latest technology