Global Retailer: Transforms Network and Boosts Customer Experience

The retailers’ stores provide style conscious customers with innovative shoes to suit every occasion. With over 160 stores globally and an evolving ecommerce platform, its in-house design team creates a unique product range for customers of its high street stores. To deliver these innovative products with the passionate, inspiring, and individual service their customers expect, they are embracing the cloud, modernising applications and transforming the network that supports them.

Design a secure, resilient, and flexible network solution to support more bandwidth intensive in-store solutions and improve customer experience.

In response to a rapidly evolving retail environment, the Retailer recognised the need for digital transformation to maintain the outstanding levels of service and engagement expected by its in-store customers.

In order to enhance customer experience, the business hoped to modernise its applications, transfer to cloud based EPOS systems, and move from traditional voice services to a cloud-based alternative.

Deployment of handheld devices would improve customer engagement by offering store associates instant access to inventory levels, along with the ability to place click-and-collect orders to other stores or arrange delivery direct to the customer’s home in the event of a local stockout.

The simple legacy store footprint comprised a single existing line. With more bandwidth intensive solutions under consideration, the network would need upgrading to provide a secure, optimised, and resilient foundation to achieve the desired business goals.

Flexibility and scalability were also critical, as rolling out new stores involved data-intensive processes requiring additional temporary bandwidth.

Kerv offered the retailer a Network Health Check. This 10-day consultancy activity analysed the network infrastructure, calculated existing and potential costs, and presented back a report that identified the best evolution strategy to meet potential network demands while maintaining tight margins. The advice was to deploy an SDWAN solution.

A multi-bonded SD-WAN solution across all stores with an agile and responsive network managed service.

Kerv designed a robust, fast, and scalable SD-WAN solution with secure and optimal break out the cloud.
The Network Health Check encouraged the retailer to review its existing service provider contracts to improve the cost efficiency of the underlay infrastructure connecting its offices, distribution warehouses and supply chain sites.

The system was streamlined with a direct internet link to applications, reducing data flow inefficiency and improving the quality of service.

The Kerv SD-WAN solution could be deployed over new or existing connections, giving the business the freedom to choose the most available and cost-efficient services for their stores.

While they effectively commoditised the underlay technologies, the SD-WAN overlay ensured they would still receive the same integrated service experience. A multi-4G bonded solution would deliver the vital additional bandwidth and availability required to upgrade store processes.

Associates could carry out stock management queries and customer orders to improve engagement, while enhanced flexibility and scalability support rapid deployment of new stores, allowing data-heavy downloading of systems and applications.

Robust and seamless failover when outages occur provides the necessary resiliency, and prioritisation of business-critical applications (such as payments) ensures the business will not miss out on potential sales in the event of a single line failure.

Increased resilience and availability, improved customer engagement and outstanding price-performance efficiency.

• Cloud Confidence
  The new network has given the business confidence to start migrating services to the cloud to improve efficiency, and the ability to embrace an omni-channel offering.
• Improved Customer Experience
  Store associates have rapid access to inventory information and allow for real time placement of
  click-and-collect and home delivery orders, preventing missed sales during stockouts.
  
• Visibility and Control
  Access to the SD-WAN management platform provides clear visibility of all traffic at application level and allows for centralised control from head office.
• Resilience and Performance
  Using multiple connections ensures heightened uptime and availability. Prioritisation ensures that critical business payment applications enjoy priority over standard applications.
• Cost Efficiency
  By rationalising the underlay technology, improved flexibility, performance, and resiliency were achieved with no cost increase to the business.
• Rapid Site Deployment
  The flexible model allows bandwidth to be scaled up to meet demand and supports the rapid deployment of new store sites.
• Responsive Support
  Kerv’s managed services provide agile, responsive support that is carefully tailored to the right solution for the business.