Retailers Growing Demand for Specialist Services

12.12.11

One of the things that continue to cause a lot of angst for back-office system vendors and retailers alike is establishing where normal support leaves off and chargeable services begin.

It can be quite difficult for a retailer to know what went wrong or who to call when a program doesn’t work, or produces something quite different to what was expected. 

Vendors too are often called on to go beyond their normal obligations.  It can be commercial suicide for the vendor to refuse to assist the retailer even where the problem may appear to be outside their normal support services, such as a third party fault, or an operator error or omission.

Today’s stores use many technology pieces making it quite costly for the vendor to employ or train support staff to this level of expertise. The alternative however can be even more costly.

Most vendors take this in their stride and provide the services in order to build good customers relations.

However, it can become quite risky when calls for assistance relate more to a retailing or business matter such as; manipulating the back office program to improve the stores pricing or promotion strategy, or assistance with setting up or trouble shooting inventory management practices. 

Quite often the retailer may want to tidy up the product data or change item settings but are quite rightly concerned about trashing their pricing information or corrupting their product file completely.   These requests often lead to frustration and ill will when the assistance sought is either inadequate, cannot be provided or worse, plainly wrong.  

Unfortunately expertise in these areas can be very thin on the ground and frequently beyond the knowledge of the vendors’ regular help-desk support staff. 

And where a vendor may recruit and train experts to deliver these services the retailer is often reluctant to pay for this believing that it should be done as part of normal “support”.  Either way, the vendor can lose, and so too the retailer.

Experiencing this first hand led Bas-X to introduce the notion of a specialist consultant with expert knowledge and skills in both retailing and retail technology to deliver services and solutions to these problems.

The consulting concept has proven to be perfect for this as the retailer can engage an expert, dedicated to understanding the retailer’s problem, and establish then deliver the right solution.

Alex Selles, a former employee of Bas-X, and Ben Uhlmann, formerly of the Hopper IGA group, established ABC Information Solutions in July this year to deliver the specialist services.  Both have extensive knowledge and experience with independent retailing practices and back office systems and to date have been well received by both retail groups and single store operators alike.

In addition to retail consulting, ABC Information Solutions provide a number of specialist management services all designed to improve the bottom line. These include:

• Retail performance evaluation and review
• KPI and management reporting
• Stock control management and reporting
• Assistance with warehouse and direct supplier hosting, including;
  • Promotion creation and manipulation
  • Automated new line creation
  • Automated direct supplier updates using received supplier invoices
• Operator training for Bas-Xplus Hosting and Reporting

For more information on the specialist services email ABCIS directly at sales@abcis.com.au and for more information about consulting email info@basx.com.au

As published in the December 5, 2011 edition of the Master Grocers Australia Independent Retailer Magazine.

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