WHSmith, the UK’s best-known retailer for Books, Stationery, Newspapers & Magazines has successfully rolled out Metro to all its High Street and UK Travel portfolio of stores. Starting with Travel (trading across more than 600 airports, train stations, hospitals and motorway services) these stores rolled out ahead of the 2016 Christmas period ensuring effective communications within the golden quarter. High Street stores followed in early 2017 with the full store estate being completed by March 2017
Metro has enabled WHSmith to actively prioritise, target communications and plan across the estate and more. Metro‘s Unified Comms and Process modules provide WHSmith with a host of functionality designed to manage communication, task management and compliance across its portfolio of both Travel and High Street stores, but from a single technology platform.
This includes the ability to send Tasks, Surveys, Forms, Voice messages, Video, and Written communications down to individuals working in the store, ensuring they only hear, see and read information or tasks that are relevant to them, their role and store format. Field Management can also undertake Store Visits, with follow up actions and dates immediately scheduled within team members diaries and to-do lists.
Serena Davies, WHS Store Operations Manager, commented on the implementation “This is one of the smoothest implementations we have done and considering the size of the rollout and the number of people involved, it has been very impressive.”
A spokesperson from the WHS IT Project Team said: “RMS offered a SaaS solution, so the implementation was simple from a technology perspective. The RMS team were very supportive during the configuration stage ensuring we delivered a solution that is right for our business”. Importantly the flexibility of Metro enables us to introduce our modules as the need arises.”
Efficiency & Compliance Benefit
Duncan Pflaeger, WHS Store Efficiency Manager said: “Centrally, we now have visibility of what is happening from the compliance reporting, which has enabled us to make more informed decisions on what is the required next step action. It’s easy to instantly see what is outstanding, in progress and completed on tasks and response forms, with easy to use follow up features, saving time at the centre.
Store & Customer Benefit
Sarah Holbrough, WHS Head Of Stores Operational Planning said: “Store Managers and staff feedback has been positive with staff stating that the new system is clearer, easier and very intuitive. The fact we can access information from the tills and tablets means that our communication system has gone mobile, allowing us to walk around the sales floor when completing tasks and response forms, which in turn makes us more efficient and gives us back time to spend with the customer.”
Karen Dyke, Managing Director for RMS said: “We are delighted with the reaction the system is having so far and the benefits that have been achieved. Our Metro product is a great fit for the WHS business, enabling different solutions to be used for the right opportunity as they present themselves.”
Recent Comments