How do you ensure quality in your IT investments?

When implementing new solutions, or updating your current ones, it is important to know how you are going to conduct them, and that you understand the needs of your business and keep an eye on trends.

To ensure quality in your IT-related investments you only have to answer one question: How are we going to support it? This is crucial in being able to choose the right solutions for your store, not to mention the right provider of solutions.

Have one single point of contact

At store level, you must handle a lot of different solutions on a daily basis. Everyone who is working directly with the technology needs to be able to trust that there’s always someone to turn to when facing an issue. Therefore, keeping a single point of contact for different errors is important. Otherwise, the recovery time might be longer than you can afford, and during this time, you won’t be able to serve your customers appropriately. This one contact must have knowledge about the next level of support – how to fix the problem and who is going to do it.

Understand your contracts

When updating IT-solutions or making whole new investments, it is also important to have a clear view of the contracts with all its technicalities. Be sure you understand them properly and that you can control them in a way suited for you and your business.

Keep up with your business

While ensuring you meet your customers’ expectations, you will also have to know what’s going on in your store, how to avoid problems and make sure that the systems are working the way they should. At the same time, you must also keep an eye on trends and regard what new solutions could be needed ahead. Read up on new innovations within IT as well as retail, and study how technology can improve the future shopping experience.

Furthermore, it is important to find the right balance and flexibility between IT’s service commitment and the needs of the business. If the service commitment is too high or too low, it might eat up the return on investment and/or lead to lost revenues. For example, if you have five or six self-checkouts and one of them breaks down, a four-hour response time would be sufficient. But if half of them aren’t working, a much faster response time is needed.