ServiceNow’s Role in Building Resilience and Efficiency in the Retail Industry

The retail industry has always been dynamic, but today’s landscape demands a level of operational agility and customer-centric innovation that few sectors experience. ServiceNow is emerging as a critical enabler, helping retailers modernize outdated systems and processes to meet these demands.

Gone are the days when retailers could rely on fragmented systems and manual processes to manage their operations. Today’s customers expect personalized, seamless experiences—whether online or in-store—and businesses must deliver with precision and speed. Achieving this requires not just incremental improvement but a complete overhaul of operational workflows, which ServiceNow empowers through its platform capabilities.

Beyond Communication: Seamlessly Connecting the Decentralized Retail Enterprise

Retailers face unique operational challenges, especially when managing networks of dealer-owned or direct-owned outlets. Traditional tools like email chains, spreadsheets or manual call logs no longer suffice in environments where speed, accuracy, and interconnectedness are non-negotiable.

ServiceNow transforms ad-hoc communications and operational requests into structured, standardized and automated workflows that drive process efficiencies and improve the way stores interface with corporate functions for a variety of operational needs. For instance, requests that previously took days or weeks—such as requesting advertising signature and store displays for seasonal promotions or coordinating maintenance requests—are significantly reduced. The end result is lower costs, and improved process efficiencies that ultimately result in better services and experiences for consumers.

Solving Retail’s Pressing Challenges with Digital Workflows

The industry’s razor-thin profit margins, labor shortages, and high employee turnover rates necessitate smarter solutions to maintain productivity. ServiceNow addresses these pain points with tools that streamline store-level operations while empowering employees to focus on customer interactions.

A prime example lies in employee onboarding. Retailers traditionally spend weeks onboarding and training new hires, in before they are ready to hit the store floor. By examining process improvement opportunities and translating them into digitized workflows on ServiceNow, retailers can simplify and streamline their entire employee onboarding process resulting in lower costs, better employee experiences and faster cycle times from offer letter to store floor deployment.

Another area where digital workflows drive cost savings and operational efficiency is equipment maintenance whether it is shipping and goods equipment such as forklifts or payment-related technology such as Point of Sale Terminals and Credit Card readers. Ongoing monitoring of retail technology assets through a healthy CMDB and integrated incident, change and break-fix processes helps ensure the technology required to generate revenue is healthy and operational. Digital Workflows to manage ongoing maintenance requests along with proactive alerts prove extremely effective in managing routine maintenance of store industrial equipment.

Bridging Digital and Physical Experiences

Modern retail success depends on delivering a cohesive customer experience across digital and physical consumer journeys. No longer individual channels, the lines are blurred between these previously distinct channels. Customers for example expect to be able to order online and schedule an in-store pick through their mobile app. Customer in-store experiences are enhanced through digital technologies such as in-store product finders, location-based flash coupons and other ways to enhance consumer experiences through digital channels to further enhance the in-store experience.

Providing a seamless omni-channel experience regardless of where a consumer journey starts and where it ends requires digital technologies, reliable infrastructure, and highly available applications and technology services. An accurate and complete CMDB along with synthesized data relationships and AI-enabled IT Operations and IT Service Management workflows ensures full visibility into the overall health of the entire technology backbone that powers a store.

When things go wrong, ServiceNow’s connected workflows on a common platform simplifies the end-to-end resolution process. Imagine a scenario where a customer raises an issue about a product in-store. Instead of siloed resolutions between store associates and an online service team, ServiceNow connects these channels, ensuring the problem is tracked and resolved seamlessly. This unified approach not only elevates the customer experience but provides retailers with actionable insights to enhance both channels.

Reducing Risks and Streamlining Operations

Products and Services are what differentiates one retail organization from another. It is these products and services that customers relate to and purchase resulting in revenue for stores. In those instances when there are issues with a product or service such as a product recall, how a retail organization handles that particular issue is critical to maintaining its brand reputation in the marketplace. When complex issues such as product recalls occur, there are numerous stakeholders that need to be engaged to address a particular product recall across the entire workflow including both internal and external stakeholders. Relying on outdated methods like mass emails, spreadsheets to track tasks, sending reminder emails as follow up action items, etc. highlights the operational gaps and inefficiencies that are inherent in handling complex, multi-stage, multi-stakeholder issues such as product recalls facing retailers. ServiceNow’s inherent capabilities of a digital workflow platform along with the ability to de-compose business processes into digital workflow components helps eliminate the reliance on spreadsheets, ad-hoc processes and reactive follow ups via email.

This digital workflow de-composition is scalable and repeatable allowing retailers to drive efficiencies into broader operational processes. For instance, what begins as an implementation of 30 workflows can scale to over 80, supported by ServiceNow’s modular architecture and robust taxonomy. The result is a retail operation that evolves with the business, continuously optimizing for efficiency and innovation.

Transform Retail Operations

By combining real-time visibility, automation, and scalability, the ServiceNow platform positions retailers to adapt and thrive in a competitive market. The modern retail organization is not just the ones that deliver exceptional products and services that consumers demand but do it in a way that is efficient and digital enabled resulting in faster adoption of new digital capabilities, better issue resolution and support for customers, and driving end to end operational efficiencies to lower cost and continuously converging the digital and physical to deliver a unified experience regardless of channel.

Discover how retailers using the ServiceNow platform are finding confidence, agility, and innovation with our help.