Seamless shopping experiences, along with superior customer service and overall customer satisfaction keep the retail world running and serve as the foundations for business growth. Behind the scenes, IT teams are working on incident response and operational efficiency, which brings things full circle for retail companies.
While customers are hunting for the perfect pair of shoes, buying brand-new appliances, or even finding yogurt on sale, IT professionals are looking for the best way to manage challenges like a heightened volume of alerts and incidents generated by various retail systems, and doing so in the most efficient way possible.
Add AIOps and IT process automation (ITPA) to the shopping cart – they’re two technologies that when combined, help companies make incident response processes, downtime, and IT efficiency better.
How Alert Management Impacts Customer Experience
Alert management is a key focus for IT teams in retail, and it’s not an easy job. Several challenges contribute to why alert management is so difficult. For starters, retail systems generate a staggering volume of alerts, including point-of-sale (POS) systems, inventory management systems, and e-commerce platforms, that come from various sources. It can often be overwhelming and can keep IT teams from prioritizing and responding to incidents in a timely manner.
There’s also the potential for alert fatigue. With so many alerts being generated, IT staff can even become desensitized to alerts, which leads to a lack of urgency and potentially, missed opportunities for intervention.
IT teams can also struggle with standardization and interoperability across retail systems. With multiple systems in use, it can be difficult to integrate them seamlessly into the overall incident response process, leading to inefficiencies and errors.
RELATED BLOG: From Alert Madness to Incident Response Nirvana: An AIOps and ITPA Strategy
In Real Life: How It Works in a National Retail Chain
Picture a national retail chain that operates over 1,000 stores across several territories. Let’s say this company uses the wide range of systems mentioned above (point-of-sale (POS) systems, inventory management systems, and e-commerce platforms), and that there’s a more-than-ideal number of alerts and incidents.
We know that too many alerts can keep IT teams from prioritizing incidents and providing timely resolutions, and that the negative impacts include customer dissatisfaction and lost revenue.
That’s when AIOps and ITPA came to the retail rescue.
To overcome the challenge of alert overload, this company’s IT team began using AIOps to filter out false-positive alerts and decide which alerts had top priority. The AIOps system used machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyze alerts from various sources and identify patterns and anomalies. What that meant for the IT team was the freedom to focus on critical incidents while low-priority alerts were automatically discarded.
They then turned to ITPA to address their second challenge of alert fatigue, as the tool helped by automating routine responses to alerts.
The ITPA system was integrated with the AIOps system, which triggered automated workflows for known issues. The IT team then found more time to focus on more complex incidents. For example, when a particular POS system encountered an issue, ITPA either automatically restarted the system or escalated the problem to a higher-level technician.
For the next strategy, this retail chain’s IT team decided on a unified AIOps and ITPA platform. It provided a single interface for managing alerts and incidents from multiple sources, reducing the need for multiple tools, as well as improving standardization and interoperability across the incident response process.
Through the synergistical use of AIOps and ITPA, this retail chain was able to facilitate its alert management processes and make significant improvements in customer satisfaction, obtain a solid reduction in downtime, and increase the efficiency of retail operations.
Sign up for a demo to learn how to leverage the power of AIOps and ITPA together.
