The retail market in Australia and New Zealand has seen a significant shift in the past 18 months, largely due to the effects of COVID-19 accelerating consumers’ appetite for online shopping. Recent data shows that, from March 2020 to January 2021, online sales in Australia have risen 65.5 per cent. Comparatively, data from NZ Post indicates New Zealanders spent NZ$1.2 billion more online in 2020 compared to 2019.

To keep up with demand, retailers and e-tailers must have suitable processes and tools in place to ensure they can process and ship orders seamlessly and without major disruptions to the customer experience (CX). However, while it’s essential that retailers invest in technologies that make the online shopping experience as smooth as possible, it’s arguably even more critical that retailers have the necessary IT infrastructure in place, underpinning their operations at a foundational level.

With this in mind, long-term ManageEngine customer, EziBuy, a New Zealand-based online apparel and house ware catalogue store, needed a reliable and easy-to-deploy solution that would streamline its IT service delivery and incident management. It needed a solution that would help their lean team manage business as usual workloads against project work to grow the business.

Integrating smart technologies into ground-level retail operations

EziBuy mails more than 23 million catalogues and processes more than 1.75 million orders every year to customers in Australia and New Zealand. The company has an IT team of five people supporting 500 users throughout the business. The IT team needs to maintain a fine balance between providing support to new initiatives and handling day-to-day needs. This puts significant pressure on the IT team because any downtime or disruption could be significantly damaging to EziBuy’s business.

EziBuy selected ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus to streamline its incident management and help desk requests, drive efficient processes, and simplify its day-to-day service delivery management. ServiceDesk Plus is a comprehensive tool that helped EziBuy take care of needs such as managing requests, changes, and projects.

Through the ServiceDesk Plus requests module, EziBuy’s IT team were able to manage its incidents and requests, accurately triage tickets, and better manage service level agreements (SLAs) and workloads. As a result, EziBuy has achieved a consistent resolution SLA percentage of 97 per cent, and overall improved ticket life cycle management. This also helps to better manage workloads alongside project work without stretching the IT team. Most importantly, this lets the EziBuy team focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences instead of waiting for IT issues to be resolved.

Additionally, the EziBuy team uses ServiceDesk Plus to quickly review and approve changes and look at historic works as needed. With the project module, EziBuy can also log potential projects and balance new initiatives with ensuring old applications are in line with new best practices. This ensures that the EziBuy team has the systems it needs to underpin efficient and customer-centric operations.

EziBuy also needed a solution that would help it manage account lockouts and track orphaned accounts that lack an associated, active user. Previously, orphaned accounts were not being appropriately managed, leading to unused accounts bloating the system. By integrating ManageEngine ADAudit Plus with ServiceDesk Plus, EziBuy automated reports to regularly show accounts not used over a period of time, which are subsequently logged as tickets and assigned to a technician for review, reducing the number of orphaned accounts remaining in the system. Using ADAudit Plus, EziBuy has significantly decreased risks to security from orphaned accounts.

ManageEngine’s suite of products seamlessly integrate with each other, letting EziBuy carry out processes across all systems. This ensures that no matter where staff members are getting their information, it will come from a single source of truth. The low-impact footprint means ManageEngine products not resource-intensive and can be run on one server, reducing costs.

With ManageEngine, EziBuy has reduced its implementation failure rate, decreased its security exposure, improved tracking of account lockouts, and enhanced tracking and disabling of orphaned accounts. Overall, this lets EziBuy better manage its operations, significantly improving the user experience and overall efficiency.

Integrating core technologies to streamline back-end processes can help retailers improve the customer experience on the front end of their systems. By better supporting the IT team with a strong technological foundation, the IT team can, in turn, better support retail and sales staff to ensure the online shopping process is seamless for customers. For EziBuy, this means more sales and more repeat customers, leading to business growth.

Arun Kumar J is regional sales director for Asia Pacific at ManageEngine.