Transforming IT support for a leading retail chain

Overview

Our client, a leading retail chain operating over 20,200 stores and 39 distribution centers across the United States, faced significant challenges managing their IT support due to high ticket volumes, legacy systems and fragmented processes. HCLTech delivered a comprehensive IT support transformation program, leveraging automation, proactive monitoring and advanced support capabilities.

The challenge

Overcoming inefficiencies in IT support

Our client operates in the highly competitive retail sector, where operational efficiency, cost control and customer satisfaction are critical for maintaining market leadership. Their processes faced significant hurdles:

Program-specific challenges:

High ticket volume: Approximately 140,000 Level 1 tickets monthly, with complex application and infrastructure issues at Level 2, spanning over 450 applications and thousands of custom and legacy systems.
Lack of automation: Manual handling of recurring issues, such as system restarts and access resets, increased agent workload and operational inefficiencies.
Limited monitoring: Over 20,000 unprioritized monthly alerts led to downtime and delayed incident resolution due to the absence of proactive monitoring.
Reactive problem management: Lack of structured root cause analysis (RCA) resulted in recurring incidents and unresolved underlying issues.

Business-specific challenges:

Increased operational costs due to repetitive manual interventions and inefficient ticket handling.
Customer dissatisfaction from frequent store outages and slow incident resolution.
Risk of compliance breaches due to limited visibility and control over IT incidents.
Inability to scale support operations to support business growth, risking store performance and brand reputation.

These challenges hindered the client’s ability to maintain seamless store operations, support rapid expansion and deliver superior customer experiences in a digital-first retail environment.

The objective

A scalable, cost-efficient IT support framework

Our client sought a single technology partner to deliver an end-to-end IT support solution that would:

Enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs to support the addition of 500–1,000 new stores annually.
Provide comprehensive support for applications, infrastructure, customers, store associates and employees.
Ensure scalability without proportional cost increases, with clear visibility into costs and performance metrics, minimize downtime, improve service quality and strengthen compliance to support digital transformation and omnichannel experiences.
Integrate seamlessly with existing systems while minimizing disruptions.

The solution was critical to aligning IT operations with the client’s goals of cost efficiency, scalability and superior customer and employee experience.

The solution

Implementing an automation-driven IT support system

HCLTech deployed a multi-faceted, tailored solution to address the client’s operational complexity and support their growth ambitions:

Business Operations Center (BOC): Delivered real-time insights into events and anomalies, automated customer reporting, managed system changes to assess impact on operations and drove continuous improvement through automation and optimized processes.
Network Operations Center (NOC): Provided 24/7 proactive monitoring, regular system health checks, asset management, incident management and ongoing knowledge base enhancements.
Problem management framework: Established reactive problem management with RCA for critical incidents and proactive measures to eliminate recurring issues, reducing ticket volumes.
Automation for ticket resolution: Implemented self-healing scripts for common issues, chatbot integration and automated password management to minimize manual interventions.
Dedicated premium care team: Managed escalated incidents, ensured SLA compliance and provided advanced support, incident reporting and trend analysis.
Dedicated store support: Created a specialized team to handle store-specific issues, including third-party vendor coordination, ensuring rapid resolution and end-to-end issue tracking.
Proactive problem approach: Implemented a new approach to generate 334 new solutions, of which 257 were implemented.

The solution was seamlessly integrated with the client’s existing infrastructure, ensuring minimal disruption and scalability to support future store expansion.

The impact

Driving efficiency and business value

The IT support transformation delivered measurable outcomes, enhancing operational efficiency and establishing a foundation for sustained growth:

Program-specific impacts:

Reduced ticket volume: Proactive monitoring of ~20,000 monthly alerts eliminated ~200 tickets caused by unaddressed issues, reducing IT and business disruptions.
Increased operational efficiency: Automation resolved ~20% of common tickets, minimizing manual effort and optimizing resource utilization.
Improved First Call Resolution (FCR): RCA and problem management improved FCR rates to over 95%, resolving underlying issues and reducing escalations.
Reduced downtime: Faster incident closure and proactive monitoring improved store productivity and employee experience.
Stabilized IT operations: Root cause analysis decreased recurring incidents, enhancing system reliability.
Reduced open incidents: Before HCLTech took over operations, the client had 100+ support groups that added up to more than 15,000 tickets without defined timelines. After implementing an SRE-based framework, the number of open incidents was reduced to less than 100 across all queues, with an MTTR of less than four hours.

Business-specific impacts:

Enhanced customer satisfaction: The BOC enabled early issue detection, improving resolution quality and increasing employee satisfaction (ESAT) to over 90%, with customer satisfaction rising by 1–2% monthly.
Improved store support: Dedicated store support accelerated resolution of store-specific issues, particularly those involving third-party vendors, ensuring reliable operations.
Cost savings: Reduced downtime, optimized resources and a scalable architecture supported store expansion without proportional cost increases.
Stronger compliance: Enhanced visibility and control over IT incidents reduced regulatory risks and strengthened compliance posture.
Scalability: The cloud-based solution supported ongoing store expansion and digital initiatives, aligning with business growth.
Optimized performance: At the time of implementation, the client had only 18,000 stores, which has since grown to 20,000. Despite no additional system capacity, compute speed across the landscape improved by 9% by optimizing and improving the performance of key business processes.
Self-help portals: Implemented various self-help portals for end-users, which reduced the dependency on IT by 50%.

Strategic takeaways

The IT support transformation program positioned the client for long-term success by enabling innovation through automation and advanced analytics, paving the way for AI-driven predictive maintenance and integrated omnichannel support. By establishing a scalable, resilient IT support framework to accommodate business growth and evolving retail trends, our client experiences reliable store operations, superior service quality and operational agility. With this strengthened competitive advantage, they can now use additional technologies to optimize their performance and enhance customer experience.