When it comes to retail, if your distribution is down, your revenue goes down. For Networking and IT Operations, you prioritize an always-on methodology of a 24/7 uptime goal; the last thing you need is availability issues or a core business service down.
You’re not alone if you’re struggling with the scale and impact of your network incidents. Not being able to resolve incidents fast enough impedes the ability to deliver mission-critical business services. This adds significant risk to the business including decreased customer satisfaction and attrition, lost revenue, financial penalties, damage to brand, and more.
For retailers to survive in the age of digital ecommerce and digitized Point of Sale (PoS) systems, even traditional retail outlets are turning to software to deliver seamless service reliability and experiences across all channels. Mitigate risk and optimize efficiency with accelerated incident resolution.
Digital Transformation Needs to Include Automated Incident Resolution
Millions of business transactions take place daily online or through a vast number of outlets and their Point of Sale (PoS) systems. Ecommerce in particular represented 17% of total retail sales in the US in 2017 with a 49% year-over-year growth according to the US Commerce Department. A network outage impacting these outlets or the ecommerce system can hurt revenue, and businesses can even lose customers patronage. Macy’s payment processing system crashed on a critical shopping day, Black Friday 2017—a nightmare scenario for the business. Both in-store and online customers could not complete transactions, costing the chain millions of dollars.
- 86% of retail IT budgets are increasing – faster than any other industry.
(We think it’s about time as only 2.1% of a retail enterprise’s budget is allocated to IT spend as a part of revenue.)
- 84% of retail IT spend includes BI & Analytics, 75% mobile friendly IT services or applications
As customer behavior and the commerce landscape changes, there is increasing risk of data loss or PoS failure. Revenue impacting network failures is a nonstarter.
Manual Remediation Methods are Inefficient
Network Operations teams are not blind to these challenges, but current methods are inadequate. Validating, diagnosing and resolving network incidents are nearly all a manual process which are time consuming and are too reliant on untrained or lesser skilled human action. Prone to human error, manual resolution yields high escalations and a high cost associated.
To resolve incidents the manual way, L1s swivel chair across multiple tools and scripts, lack context and procedural guidance, and are rarely successful at fully resolving a critical incident on their own. This leads to a high rate of escalations to pricey, busy, and scarce L2 or L3 engineers who often have to repeat steps to address the incident, leading to further delays.
Automation, and leveraging human expertise with human-guided automation, are essential to a network and IT incident resolution strategy, but current network automation tools fail to live up to their promise. Only 4% of teams indicate they apply automation for network diagnosis and troubleshooting in a satisfactory way!
Human-Guided Automation is Necessary for Retail Incident Resolution
How can network automation, and human-guided process guidance as part of a larger runbook, accelerate resolution time? With Resolve, incidents can be remediated with no human involvement (what we like to call end-to-end automation) or when a human needs to be involved, Resolve provides human-guided automation. A front line agent or end user is in more of a “self-service mode” and can be guided through a resolution process and can make intelligent decisions when necessary. As part of a larger runbook, agents are enabled and empowered to take action on a step to resolution.
- From the simplest to most complex incidents, a mix of automation and human expertise and judgment accelerates resolution
- An effective resolution strategy left shifts the knowledge and capabilities from a SME to a Level 1 agent, reducing escalations and reducing cost
- The power of Resolve is not limited and is scalable to the most complex use cases. Automation is not contained to only the simple use cases but can be developed to tackle larger, agent-led solutions
- Organizational knowledge no longer resides only in the minds of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) but can be captured as procedures and automation to rapidly be put to use for resolving incidents
With Resolve’s human-guided automation, Service Desk and Level 1 agents can execute specific diagnostic and remediation actions on the network infrastructure without escalations, whereas normally they would not have permission to access these systems.
Example Use Case: Automated Diagnostics for Critical Incident Management
- Resolve integrates with most IT Infrastructure systems including IT Service Management, Event Monitoring, and more
- Diagnose P1/P2 incidents by running automations across your network and IT infrastructure
- Provide a real-time resolution dashboard of proactive health check results and current incidents
- Reduce escalations by empowering L1 agents with human-guided automations to resolve more common incidents
As an expert in enterprise-scale incident resolution, Resolve accelerates network and IT incident resolution from beginning to end by providing guidance to L1 agents to speed the validation, diagnosis, and resolution with automated actions.
About the Author, Resolve Staffer:
This post was written by one of the awesome contributors on the Resolve team.
