Jane Norman outsources IT for out-of-hours

The fashion retailer’s eight-strong IT team will continue to provide technical support to stores during normal working hours, while Retail Assist will provide service at other times – for example, on evenings and weekends – to minimise technical problems experienced.

Jane Norman IT director Philip Boggis said he wanted to reallocate the IT support team to strategic projects, rather than cover the out-of-hours support.

Boggis said: “It is critical for us to ensure that we have continuity of service in the shops because the out of hours and, in particular Saturdays and Sundays, are very important trading periods.”

He added: “We also have to make sure that as many calls as possible are fixed on the first call, because we need our shop teams to concentrate on trading, and not to be worrying about problems with the IT.”

Retail Assist’s helpdesk can remotely dial in to individual tills in stores where there are faults to resolve problems as quickly as possible.

At the same time, the support firm has also taken over the monitoring of the retailer’s head office servers at weekends. This includes ensuring that batch processing on its Mecatus merchandise management system and store polling takes place as planned.