Many different organizations use Jira Service Management to fulfill their ITSM strategy, from mortgage lenders to retailers and biotechnology companies. However, each of these sectors comes with different challenges and opportunities, whether robust regulatory requirements, budgetary constraints, or growing scale.
We’re creating a series to unpack how Jira Service Management benefits Atlassian users across different industries. In this piece, we’ll dig into how retailers have leveraged Jira Service Management features to bolster their internal communication and customer support.
From AI-powered chatbots to big data and analytics, new technology continues to add power to the customer experience arsenal for retail companies. But for every new tool, retailers face a common challenge: scale. Retailers often have many locations, large internal teams, thousands of customers and are often operating across international borders. Plus, customers increasingly expect seamless, streamlined solutions that toggle easily between online and offline channels. That means retailers need the right support and management for any technology they implement.
In order to juggle myriad IT assets and support business growth, retail companies rely on IT service management (ITSM) strategies and tools. A retailer's ITSM strategy can mean the difference between holding back customer experience and propelling it forward.
As an industry-leading service management platform, Jira Service Management (JSM) is built to power cutting-edge ITSM at the scale retailers need. Flexible templates, self-service options, automation capabilities, and robust external plug-ins make JSM a smart choice for retail businesses—and offer a remarkable return on investment to boot.
1. Automation simplifies volume in a multichannel world
In a multichannel retail environment, support agents must field requests from a variety of sources, not to mention numerous internal teams. At scale, manual assignment and coordination of tickets can be unrealistic for the scale that most retailers need—not to mention that it introduces human error.
At Ta-Ta Supermercados, one of the oldest and largest supermarket chains in Uruguay, requests submitted via self-service portals are automatically assigned to service agents. Between initial requests and escalation, this automation saves over 4,000 hours of work per year and significantly reduces time to resolution.
In the United Kingdom, the Very Group deals with tens of thousands of support tickets each year. Automation has increased efficiency and self-service, making JSM much faster and easier to use. Their customers agree: their service satisfaction score has increased to 4.9/5. Going forward, the company continues to work to improve automation capabilities, further improving response times.
2. Flexible, customized solutions drive advanced insights
Ta-Ta Supermercados has thousands of employees across hundreds of stores, and several offices nationwide. With so many locations, the business needed a tool that could offer centralized visibility into ticketing, providing valuable context that allowed leadership to make strategic changes to improve overall customer experience.
Working with an external partner, Ta-Ta configured and deployed a JSM instance with tailored self-service portals for HR, IT, finance and commercial teams, as well as suppliers. They even created a chatbot available via WhatsApp, enabling cashiers to submit tickets right from the register. By setting up a self-service portal across teams, Ta-Ta gained unprecedented visibility across tickets and across teams.
The initial phase of self-service offerings was so successful that the IT team decided to integrate logistics, HR, labor relations, finance, and marketing service requests into the self-service portal as well, providing a comprehensive overview of case resolution across the entire company. Powerful customization now allows leadership to easily access the insights they need for strategic decisions.
3. Boost capabilities and consistency with external plug-ins
As one of the largest retailers in Brazil, Via Varejo S.A. manages the brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce sites of multiple major brands under its umbrella, serving 60 million customers each year in total. In order to continue delivering seamless online and offline experiences, the retailer sought to implement agile methodologies and pursue digital transformation using Atlassian tools.
JSM’s external plug-ins allowed the company to overhaul their application lifecycle management (ALM) process without disrupting the always-on, seamless service experience their customers expect. Via Varejo used the TFS4 Jira plug-in to transfer over 17,000 tickets from their legacy server to the new system. Seamlessly integrating the plug-in facilitated secure data transfer, without downtime or disruption of the CI/CD pipeline. In fact, using the Atlassian suite grew the number of deployments by 117% in the first three months, reaching an additional 1,432 deployments in the first year.
JSM prioritizes the speed and flexibility retail consumers demand
A great customer support experience starts well before a ticket is even created: it rests on the foundation of the company’s ITSM tool. For retailers, supporting this experience requires scale across multiple platforms and locations.
Using JSM allows retailers to respond to multichannel requests and rapidly create customer-focused solutions. With flexible, customizable self-service options, add-ons, and automation capabilities, JSM can be tailored to deliver service management at the scale retailers need. As a result, customers receive the seamless multichannel experience they expect—and the streamlined support they deserve.