Carrefour delivers great in-store experience

A retail giant
Carrefour is one of the world’s retail giants. It operates more than 12,000 hypermarket, supermarket, grocery and convenience stores in more than 30 countries—around a quarter of which are in France. Carrefour customers enjoy the highest quality, both in terms of produce and the shopping experience.

Identifying, reporting, and remediating problems
France depends on Carrefour. As one of the world’s largest supermarket chains, it reaches 104 million households a year, and its locations act as both important community hubs and economic focal points. On average, no one in France is more than eight minutes away from a Carrefour store. Delivering this level of service requires an unshakeable focus on the customer. And underpinning that is a commitment to the strongest and most efficient levels of store operation and maintenance.

Carrefour needed to improve the management of its in-store and warehouse service requests. Using its old system, if a refrigerator or other fitting on the shop floor failed, it would take time to identify, report, and remediate. This potentially resulted in food wastage and reduced profitability. Customers would also face empty chiller cabinets, while agents assigned engineers to the job, and as engineers diagnosed the issue and waited for replacement parts.

“The system was quite outdated and slow,” explains Corina Vlonga, Store Director at Carrefour’s Morangis supermarket. “The turnaround time between submitting a request and the work being completed was too long.”

Taking control of the process
Carrefour worked with ServiceNow to develop a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) solution called ‘Click & Repair’. This solution is a pioneering initiative by Carrefour, and a first for ServiceNow in the retail sector. 

Click & Repair is an application that makes it easy for Carrefour store managers and their teams to get ahead of issues and prevent them from happening. And, when problems do occur, it helps them to ensure that they’re resolved quickly and effectively.

Technical and security assets in Carrefour stores and warehouses are clearly marked with QR codes. When a member of the Carrefour team notices an issue with an asset—for example a faulty refrigerator fan or a broken door seal—they simply open the app on their phone and scan in the relevant QR code.

Carrefour’s innovative ‘Click & Repair’ app is powered by ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) and Field Service Management (FSM). When the employee scans in the code, ServiceNow automatically identifies key information of the broken piece such as its serial number. This information is routed to the right technician based on intelligent automation and assignment rules. ServiceNow provides that expert with the context and information they need to resolve the issue quickly minimizing impact to the store and its customers.

‘Click & Repair’ reduces employee effort, simplifies operations, and helps Carrefour to ensure that all equipment is running as it should so customer’s get the excellent Carrefour experience they expect. “Using the Click & Repair tool, powered by ServiceNow, makes it easy for stores to notify our team as soon as they encounter a problem,” says Azzedine El Boudali, Maintenance Officer at Carrefour Athis-Mons. “We then take control of the request and escalate it to the service provider.”

Maintenance callout times are defined by contracts: engineers must service a freezer unit within two hours, or four hours for chillers and refrigerators. And by using Click & Repair, Carrefour store managers now have end-to-end visibility over the process of equipment maintenance. If a refrigerator goes down, they can ensure that it’s up and running again in the fastest time possible.

Focused maintenance, clear results
Carrefour staff can now request maintenance services quickly and easily, and as soon as an issue is discovered. The mobile app provides the team flexibility to take action on the shop floor, at the petrol station, or in the carpark—wherever the staff member finds the issue.

According to Corina, digital is the best way to improve both the customer and colleague experience. Click & Repair is agile and fast, and it allows users to put a process in place easily and be certain of a quick response. “All the supervisors in Morangis use Click & Repair in store and enjoy its agility,” she adds. “Previously, some didn’t have the confidence to use the tool on the computer.”

Responses to Click & Repair from all Carrefour teams have been very positive, with the ServiceNow solution saving time, particularly when generating requests or finding the right contractors. Corina also reports that customers have noticed improvements, with maintenance work far more focused and repairs completed much more quickly, limiting disruption to the in-store customer experience.

Opportunities for widened deployment
Click & Repair reduces administrative work and provides improved support, technical, and security processes for Carrefour staff, freeing them up to carry out more important tasks with colleagues or assist and advise customers on the shop floor. More importantly, it means Carrefour customers can shop with confidence, knowing that the food in their baskets is fresh and of exceptional quality.

“This project, to upgrade the CMMS, was part of a wider challenge to get all our market stores, hypermarkets and warehouses to engage with a single objective: simplify, simplify, simplify,” says Guillaume Verkant, Technical Director for Carrefour France. “By implementing this new application, the monitoring of service providers is much more thorough, more precise, and there has been a significant improvement in repair times for stores.”

The solution has been rolled out across all in-store technical and security assets, and Carrefour is now working on launching a similar system for cleaning at its stores. A new cleaning workflow, built on the same model, will help manage the work carried out by a contractor working instore and standardize the experience across stores. Carrefour is also considering widening Click & Repair’s deployment to IT equipment, to other countries in the group, and to its franchise partners.

He concludes: “This partnership with ServiceNow is a first for Carrefour, and should open up lots of different opportunities to digitize and simplify our applications.”

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