The company made some changes to its operations in recent years. For example, Partners had traditionally needed five or six different electronic devices to carry out various tasks on the shop floor—scanning barcodes, taking inventory, etc. But recently the company consolidated all of these services into a single multifunction handheld device. Well, almost all of them.
“We really wanted every Partner with a device to be able to have access to telephony,” explains Phil Hawes, Senior Retail Change Lead for Waitrose & Partners. “Partners were still carrying separate phones around. Or, if they needed to take a call, they had to find the nearest landline phone in the shop.”
Waitrose & Partners determined that the right cloud phone solution could allow them to consolidate partners’ equipment even further, and at the same time improve customer service at all of the company’s hundreds of stores.
“Putting a cloud phone app on our Partners’ handsets meant that everyone—customers, Partners in the store, even Partners calling in from different stores—could more easily and more quickly get connected to the right people,” says Sandra Stigwood, the company’s Senior Network Infrastructure Manager.