Delivering a freshly cut retail experience to captivate customers

How do today's successful retail organisations protect revenue and accelerate growth? Hannes Lategan, solutions strategist, CA Southern Africa, examines how Application Performance Management (APM) can help the industry consistently deliver rewarding customer service by proactively minimising service-availability risks to assure end-to-end customer transactions.

He also spotlights how one of Europe's leading consumer electronics and high-technology retailers is using APM as part of an e-POS performance management solution to enhance customer service, create more stable revenue streams, and increase IT productivity.

As large retail organisations surf the tide of consumer choice across multiple channels in their quest to win new customers and grow the business, they must contend with ever more discerning but less loyal customers.

This makes it more important than ever to deliver a consistently rewarding and valued customer experience. 'Satisfactory' customer service no longer suffices - service needs to be slick, quick, and brilliantly executed. The advent of so many channels, growing competition, and niche marketing has made retail a buyers' market, with the result that retailers are now adopting ever-more sophisticated business retention and attraction strategies to increase share of wallet.

Retailers are also deploying innovative, pioneering technologies across both their physical and virtual sales channels to ensure uninterrupted, efficient services that exceed customer expectations. These technologies support critical services, such as real-time stock control, customer relationship management, and pinpoint-accurate distribution mechanisms. Clearly they need, more than ever before, to ensure that the increasingly complex technologies underpinning customer service do not (themselves) introduce or pose any business threats.

But it's not all about complexity. On whiteboards in retail boardrooms, you'll see a common set of challenges written in marker pen. First, there's the need to exceed customers' expectations, but treating all customers as important individuals the business depends on - every time. Second, they need to protect revenue by proactively preventing downtime or performance issues. Third, they are consistently looking to accelerate growth with new capabilities, new channels, and new sources of revenue. Fourth, against a backdrop of thin margins, they need to control costs, by leveraging existing investments and ensuring the efficient delivery of IT services. And if that wasn't challenging enough, it all needs to be achieved with a rapid return on investment and with the least amount of risk.

In this complex multi-channel retail environment, the humble cash register remains the front line of success. It may have evolved into a smart Java or .NET-based electronic point-of-sale (e-POS) network client, but the cash till remains a formidable weapon - improving staff efficiency and the customer's experience by speeding up point of sale functionality; reducing queuing; and empowering staff to answer pricing and stock queries quickly. Of course the converse is also true. These smart tills communicate with pricing, stock and retail inventory management systems, as well as business integration applications (via Internet protocols).

So how do today's successful retailers go about mitigating point-of-sale (POS) risk and ensuring the service delivery mechanism performs exactly as required each time, every time? The answer is to fine-tune end-to-end Web application performance management (APM).

Indeed, in-store e-POS systems are the ideal entry point for optimising the performance of almost every retail application, since Web-based technologies and solutions are applied to similar challenges both online and in-store. Optimise till performance and you can end up with a robust, optimal customer service across all points of sale, physical and virtual.

APM helps deliver the superior online experience end-users expect by enabling retailers to monitor transactions and understand the impact of application performance on the customer in real-time so they can make collaborative business decisions to meet service-level expectations.

The experience of one of Europe's leading consumer electronics and high technology retailers highlights the value of e-POS performance management. Put simply, the retailer was experiencing the early symptoms of “revenue haemorrhage” during peak season. An unforeseen series of till outages caused customers to walk away from point-of-sale queues and the retailer had no idea what was causing the outages. Neither did they know how to rectify the problem and avert similar future risk.

IT bosses quickly realised that this blind-spot left the mission-critical Java-based e-POS frontline across 750 outlets severely exposed. Unless quickly rectified, any further problems with the underlying software would go undetected until they severely compromised the in-store experience, impacting the bottom-line within minutes. This realisation triggered an immediate hunt for an incident detection and prevention solution, which would quickly unearth the root cause of current outages and provide deep insight.

The solution needed to ensure optimal, around-the-clock performance of the organisation's 10 000 JAVA-based e-POS systems, and minimise operational surprises and losses. Moreover, the e-POS performance management solution would need to unify event, fault and performance management to ensure service availability, while simultaneously providing senior management with a business process-based view to enable rapid remedial decision-making across IT and the business.

Like countless other retailers, this organisation's smart tills (Java thick-clients) leverage a Web-centric IBM WebSphere stack, installed on a fault-tolerant Solaris operating environment, and tap into Oracle databases.

Pinpointing and diagnosing service performance threats in such an environment is challenging at the best of times; but in a deployed system already in production any application weaknesses quickly manifested at the tills - with serious consequences. Incident teams of up to 10 people would be hurriedly convened from a range of departments, IT partners, and developers to hunt for the root-cause after an event had already compromised business. This further impacted efficiency and productivity without providing any guarantee of success.

An APM solution - in this case based on CA Wily APM technology - was deployed to conduct an emergency health-check of the live system. Within a few hours, the health-check shed light and showed how monitoring each of the company's e-POS terminals would provide real-time assurance for the entire network. Subsequently, a full pilot was implemented - within just four days of its operation this unearthed important transactional performance data that the retailer did not know existed, and valuable insight into a further potential service availability risk.

This e-POS performance management solution captures all Internet protocol traffic generated as staff uses any e-POS. It then charts service level measurements of all key business processes generated by the till - in real-time.

Before any at-risk performance thresholds are breached, the key stakeholders are automatically alerted and presented with the relevant risk assessment information. This highly effective early warning system then automatically pinpoints any root cause of degradation within the 'back end' environment; augmenting the early warning system with deep real-time monitoring and diagnostics of the underlying Java environment.

Unlike online shopping, this retailer's tills have a 'thick Java' client residing on them, so an application management product (CA Wily Introscope) is installed on one till in each of the retailer's 750 stores. This provides additional benefit by monitoring a comprehensive sample of the tills to complete the end-to-end monitoring. In essence, CA Wily CEM monitors tills or online customers, while CA Wily Introscope keeps track of back-end systems and applications residing on the tills; and enables diagnostics in the event of any degradation in performance.

The solution monitors all transactions and information requests from end-to-end, tracing the link between POS-user requests and the back-end systems that fulfil the request, and then making critical information about the transaction available to every stakeholder.

Then, when a performance issue arises, operations teams can detect incidents before SLAs are compromised and business managers can immediately understand the business and customer impact of the incident and prioritise the appropriate resolution. Application support can quickly isolate the problem to its cause, back-end system administrators can immediately determine if their systems are impacting application performance, and developers can determine whether code errors are involved. Deep transaction visibility therefore helps every stakeholder work collaboratively, using a common language, to achieve the same objectives. The net result being superior service delivery, high rates of customer satisfaction, and revenue assurance.

While growing pure-play online trade is the driving force behind business acceleration, constantly improving service quality across all channels is vital, so a mastery of multi-channel retailing is necessary. That mastery depends upon customer-centricity delivered through fail-safe e-commerce presences and in-store e-POS arrays. A next-generation APM solution enables retail organisations to assure customer transactions by predicting, pre-empting and preventing problems - from the till to the cloud.