AmCore: Customer Engagement Center for HoReCa
What do you need to know about customer engagement service? How do it help to grow your business? In this post we’re going to tell you our HoReCa client’s story, point by point.
AmRest Holdings SE is an international company that manages 2 345 restaurants in 26 countries including global brands like Burger King, Starbucks, La Tagliatella, Blue Frog, Kabb, Bacoa, Sushi Shop. AmRest has 260 opened KFC and PizzaHut restaurants in Russia, and their success solely depends on high speed and quality of customer support.
“This project is best remembered for automatization of logistic and quality control processes which were delivered in the first stage of the project. Usually the initiator of Service Desk’s updating or implementation is the IT department with the main goal to improve customer support in IT only. But in this case, there was a duo of IT and SCM as a project’s driver. Customer Focus and Operational Excellence are essential values of AmRest. The same can be said about Radiant System’s values. Thanks for the vote of confidence from a great team that values quality and efficiency!”
Alexey Yusov, CEO Radiant System
The challenge: broaden the range of Service Desk
The company’s IT department used Alloy Software before they implemented ((OTRS)) Community Edition based Service Desk. The software had a license fee but wasn’t versatile enough to be “one size fits all”. Alloy was used only for IT requests while the company needed similar software for all of IT, HR, Supply, Finance, and Maintenance. Alloy filled only with a tenth of all needs. The company was choosing a new solution between ((OTRS)) Community Edition, Zendesk and Jira.
The difficulty of choosing a provider was first of all in the large worldwide company’s unique processes. IT department realized that an off-the-shelf product couldn’t cover all of AmRest’s needs and about 50% of features required would need to be developed on top. The new solution was supposed to be placed on the internal server system and, as far as feasible, not to be dependent on any vendor. This should ensure data secure, statutory compliance and the opportunity of independent growing. The company started looking for the new solution right after they acquired the rights to PizzaHut brand development, so the implementation speed became one of the first criteria in choosing the new platform.
The solution: ((OTRS)) Community Edition with Radiant System
Radiant Service Desk became the solution that matched all criteria. It’s an open source ((OTRS)) Community Edition based system. Main reasons for the choice:
- Fast implementation that wouldn’t affect the restaurants’ work.
- Average cost of the main solution, modifications, and implementation was in 3 or 4 times cheaper than Jira or Zendesk could offer.
- A free license based system can easily be placed on the company’s servers. In comparison, Zendesk works with SaaS model only.
- Permissive license and open source code lowered the risk of vendor lock-in.
- The solution had great potential for creating in-house support and scaling up at low cost.
“The key reason for choosing our new partner was Radiant System’s expertise and efficiency. We have got a detailed and clear description of the final result and acceptable timescales. That showed their great project management skills. We’ve got clarity and confidence about the deadlines. We had the exact deadline for entire project and the launch dates for all the features’’
Alexey Yarkov, IT Country Manager Russia, AmRest Holdings SE
The complex implementation of Radiant Service Desk was finished in 6 months. All tasks were divided into 3 stages.
Feature implementation for Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain for restaurants is one of the key business processes in HoReCa. AmRest’s Supply Chain Management department provides fail-safe work of all KFC and PizzaHut restaurants, managed by AmRest in Russia. Food quality control and optimization of work with suppliers became top-priority tasks for the system. These main processes were up and running 30 days after the contract was signed.
Feature implementation for IT and Maintenance
Radiant System along with AmRest’s team run Service Desk’s features for requests to IT and Maintenance services. That’s how restaurants could book and trace all tickets in one system. The feature implementation took about 2 months.
User’s interface development
In 2018, when the project had just started, the portal interface didn’t fulfill all needs of AmRest. The company needed a more user-friendly interface that would fit corporate identity perfectly and had some learning features. However that didn’t stand in the way of launching the platform. We were improving the platform interface and developing new features while AmRest actively made use of the system. It took about 3 months.
The result: peace and quiet for the tech support and satisfied customers
The new customer portal was named AmCore after the company itself. AmCore gave the company the flexibility it needed most. There were a lot of benefits to implementing the solution, and the biggest for the client were the next:
- New quality control system
IT team in AmRest delegated all big jobs in the restaurants to contracting companies. Contractors were making progress reports by themselves before ((OTRS)) Community Edition was implemented, so AmRest couldn’t see the timelines or the results. When all requests began to be processed in one system the team could get a clear picture of the contractor’s work, including accessing all work chats and tracing their workflow steps on every ticket.
- Taking the load off the first line of support
Before AmCore was integrated, the first line of support was overwhelmed with a huge number of calls, while the second line of support had nothing to do. Straight after the AmCore implementation the number of calls to technical support fell dramatically. Now users create requests directly in the customer portal without any help. All they need now is to choose a request category and symptoms from a drop-down list. The system automatically sends requests to the right team based on the selected characteristics.
- SLA has become measurable and manageable
The client marked this result as the most valuable. Before AmCore’s implementation SLA calculating practices didn’t even exist, and now the company achieved a stable SLA for restaurants. AmCore allowed both to build it to be flexible for each service and to get statistics easily.
- Customer satisfaction has increased by 20%
Before the AmCore a recurring the regular Customer Satisfaction Survey showed the level of satisfaction with IT department’s work to be no more than 50%. Thanks to the new platform the client identified areas for improvement and set milestones for growth. Team worked hard on it, and the customer satisfaction level increased up to 70% in 1,5 years.
AmCore showed a very special result during the ongoing pandemic. The Service Desk has allowed not only to transition to remote work easily, but also to quickly minimize cost while keeping the highest level of customer support.
“Thanks to Radiant System’s team for efficiency and flexibility. They quickly replied to many urgent questions when they would pop up during the implementation process. The project team is very dynamic and managed all critical nuances perfectly”
Alexey Yarkov, IT Country Manager Russia, AmRest Holdings SE
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Thanks to our Editor:) Alexandra Khmarskaya
