In the retail and hospitality world, IT leaders are faced with a growing list of technology challenges. As the amount of technology increases within their enterprise, both deployment and ongoing support concerns are on the rise. Level 10 has found that with a few simple tweaks to their technology deployment strategy, merchants can achieve higher levels of deployment success while easing their ongoing support burdens.
Understanding Today's Technology Challenges
As consumers have become more tech-savvy, they expect a seamless shopping experience. To meet these expectations, retailers and restaurants are maintaining and managing a more complex tech infrastructure than ever before.
On top of growing consumer demand, IT managers are facing accelerated project timelines, shorter store opening schedules, and more robust technology. In the rush to be first to market with the latest innovations, they may overlook elements of their deployments which can lead to costly delays and remediations.
Now, let’s delve into three practical solutions for these technology problems. By adopting the following strategies, merchants can improve the success of their deployments and ultimately boost customer satisfaction.
Solution 1: Consolidate Your Partners
The more third-party partners vendors that merchants work with throughout the deployment process, overall project quality erodes while costs and headaches increase. By strategically streamlining these partnerships merchants will significantly increase efficiency and minimize errors and remediations while reducing overall costs.
While it may sound simple, one aspect is often overlooked. Merchants should strategically analyze their vendor ecosystem and then reduce them to the minimum amount possible. Ideally, to a single point. Merchants often feel as though this isn’t possible or minimize certain details, which results in a broader vendor ecosystem than necessary. By working with a single vendor for centralized staging, installation, and network cabling of their IT rollouts, merchants greatly increase the overall quality of their deployments.
Solution 2: Optimize How You Schedule Field Technicians
Other than not using a centralized staging partner, mismanaged field technician scheduling is the single largest inhibitor to technology deployment success. It is critical to approach the deployment schedule from a geographical alignment standpoint as much as humanly possible. At times, this is at odds with internal goals of operational or store-type desires.
At Level 10, we look to re-engage the same technicians in each geographic area to perform installations at multiple store locations to ensure quality, accuracy, and speed of performance. We always recommend merchants involve their installation partner sooner in the scheduling process than later so they can help create a schedule that is best planned to make the best use of field technicians, improve efficiency, and control costs.
Solution 3: Never Skip Proof of Concepts (POCs)
Another key is to prioritize proof of concepts (POCs). A POC is a small-scale demonstration or trial that helps businesses evaluate whether a particular technology solution is suitable for their business needs. This allows merchants to make informed decisions based on real-world testing.
By conducting POCs, businesses can gain hands-on validation of the planned deployment process. Rarely, if ever, are initial POCs successful, which makes them all the more important while there is often pressure to move beyond them quickly. Balancing the time needed to be successful along with overall project timelines is critical, despite how challenging it may be. POCs are critical to helping merchants avoid technology deployment horror stories.
At Level 10, POCs are one of the first steps in our 8-step project management approach. Our team works closely with our clients to design and execute POCs that address their specific needs and requirements.
During the POC process, we provide comprehensive support and guidance, ensuring our clients have all the necessary resources to evaluate our technology solutions effectively. This includes access to cutting-edge hardware, technical documentation, and dedicated support from our team.
POCs allow merchants and their vendor partners to minimize the risks associated with implementing new technologies. By identifying any potential issues or limitations early on and making the necessary adjustments before full-scale deployment, they can avoid disastrous and costly delays during implementation.
Your Trusted Advisor for Retail IT Solutions
With extensive industry experience and expertise, we understand the unique challenges that businesses face in today's tech-driven world. Level 10 acts as a trusted advisor to our clients, providing honest feedback, recommendations, and proven processes like these to help merchants achieve their technology project goals.
These are just a few ways to address some of the most common IT issues merchants are currently running into. For more solutions for your technology problems, download our white paper, “5 Hard Truths You Need to Hear About Your IT Rollouts.”
