BT Fresca & Expedite Blog
Where e-commerce becomes a community
Posts Tagged ‘BT Expedite’
12 Dec
Rich Lowe has been promoted to run BT’s global audio and video conferencing business. We’re sad to see him go but delighted that Richard Dodd (our COO) is taking over. For those of you who don’t know Richard, he’s a poacher turned gamekeeper. After many years at Tesco, latterly as International Store Operations and IT Director, he joined us in 2006. Firstly as CTO and latterly as COO, Richard has been the intellectual force behind our multi-channel vision and is always looking out for the latest innovations to bring our clients.
Our customers will get to hear more from Richard at our next client conference but he’s a big fan of social media and you follow him @richard_m_dodd or via LinkedIn.
Richard Dodd, CEO, BT Expedite & Fresca
27 Sep
…at the new store opening at Westfield Stratford City…oh and our EPOS in the foreground 
…
17 Jun
Pretty much every night of the week, the glamorous hotels that line London’s Park Lane are filled to bursting with the brightest and best of the business world. Every sector of society has its own awards night when, dressed in black tie or ball gowns, executives from Britain’s top organisations flock with fingers crossed to the heart of the West End. Last Tuesday was our night, the night of the BT Retail Week Technology Awards.
Giving awards in the business world can seem a little trivial at a time of austerity but, with people often working longer hours with fewer resources, there’s no better moment to publically recognise success. And we can testify from our own experience that a sliver-winning project team will return from London brighter and better motivated than when they left, albeit with eyelids propped open with matchsticks for a few days. Trophies look great in the boardroom too.
This is the second year we’ve sponsored the Retail Week Technology Awards. It’s a great hospitality and networking event where we can meet existing and potential customers in informal – but heavily branded – surroundings. You can network equally well in a box at Lords but associating our brand strongly with a leading publication, and with innovation pays dividends. The other positive about awards sponsorship is that we get plenty of brand awareness in the run up to the event, as the organisers crank up their marketing, and afterwards as the winners publicise their success.
This year, there were many worthy winners and you can find out who they were and why they won on the Retail Week Technology awards 2011 website. I’d like to highlight two of my favourites. The first is the surprise success of Whistles (one of our customers) in the Best Project Implementation category which shows that smaller retailers can compete on the big stage. The second is Shutl’s success with Argos. Shutl offer 90 minute delivery of online orders by sending a local courier to pick up the goods from store. This turns shops into a competitive advantage for multichannel retailers versus the pure plays and is the most innovative application of technology to a retail business problem for a while. We’ve subsequently implemented Shutl linking to our Integrated Store product at Aurora Fashions.
So, that’s it for the BT Retail Week Technology Awards for this year but the brightest and best in retail technology will be reconvening in Park Lane in the Autumn for the Retail Systems bash. Maybe we’ll see you there.
Blog post by Geoffrey Barraclough – Director, Strategy, Marketing & Propositions, BT Expedite
18 May
We’ve recently gone live with Whistles, our latest store services customer. For those unfamiliar with the world of fashion, Whistles is cutting edge, womenswear brand based in London that counts Kate Middleton among its customers. Whistles have 36 stores which trade using BT Expedites’ Store 6 POS supplemented by a successful e-commerce website from BT Fresca.
As part of the new service, we’re providing:
• First line store helpdesk
• 2-4th line standard support for Store 6
• Hosted card payment
• Hardware break-fix maintenance
We’re delighted that Whistles with BT Expedite and Retail Assist won The Project Implementation of the Year award at the Retail Week Technology awards on 14th June 2011.
We’re increasingly finding retailers asking us to take ownership of their store technology – helpdesk, hardware maintenance and networks as well as our Store 6 POS software. Often, we offer what we call BT Managed Store – a proactive service which involves our people running through daily checks of a retailer’s estate so that they can fix problems before they impact trading performance.
BT Managed Store customers include WH Smith, Primark, Mothercare & JJB Sports.
Read more about our managed services on our website
27 Apr
As you are probably aware Britain is celebrating the 11-day Easter and Royal wedding holiday with a drinking and shopping spree some commentators have suggested may be worth a whopping £1.2bn to the economy.
I look after the support desk for our Store customers and they’ve kept us very busy in the run up to this critical trading period. Retailers are all different; some of our customers see the Bank holiday trading and the Royal Wedding as an opportunity for increased sales of bikes or camping equipment for those people wishing to get away from it all while the garden centres will see a huge uplift in bunting, flags and picnic ware. Some of our Fashion and Shoe retailers will be running promotions around Wedding attire and footwear, offering promotions on the wedding day to encourage people to shop for that special day themselves.
To ensure trouble free trading our customers make me and my team aware of all promotional activity well in advance and we make sure that the new price files get to the tills in good time to ensure the retailers have no issues during this busy time. We also monitor daily sales and ensure that transaction processing is flowing and that credit card sales are being taken correctly at the tills.
Retailing is always a competitive business and many will react to each other’s moves and frequently decide to go to sale or offer additional discounts to encourage better sales. We are here to ensure that all of these activities are supported and our clients have a trouble free and profitable trading period.
Julie Painter – Client Care Support Supervisor, BT Expedite
www.btexpedite.com/managedservices
14 Feb
…fortified with stuffed Quail and Venison
In this world of multiple channels, always on, 24/7, 99.999% up time, as technologists it’s rare to find time to pause for breath. So to be able to relax in the comfortable surroundings of Chicheley Hall for our bi-annual customer CIO Forum, pausing for reflection and chewing the fat with ones colleagues and CIOs from some of our leading clients was a welcome diversion. Not that there was much fat on a meal that included an entire stuffed quail, followed by venison, mind you. For the former was it really Quail or perhaps the smallness of the bird was because we were simply eating from a long way away, driven by talk of applications provided on the cloud, obscuring our vision.
Prior to this veritable feast, conversation had raged round the table, amongst BT Expedite management, and retailers from the clothing, footwear, pets, automotive accessories and outdoor sectors. Key themes that emerged included the following:
How can retailers retain control of brand values, yet put the customer at the centre of the business? Would the move to providing more product information, opening up Facebook channels and customers using their smart phones to research, lead to the loss of control of brand, or would product always be king? Perhaps it depends on the sector of retailer?
Should retailers spend money training their staff on their increasingly diverse product ranges, or perhaps focus on providing detailed content directly to the increasingly savvy consumer, via iPad and iPhone channels? Would customers see that as a service?
When would we see the death of fixed POS devices, chained to desks, only there to take money? Would the increasingly sophisticated product information and multichannel needs of stores finally result in moving to a true point of service environment, enabled by tablet and/or retail hardened iPad devices, with customers paying by their own smart phones?
When will we see the end of paper based receipts, replaced by emails containing all the relevant information? Wouldn’t that be an easier way for customers to manage things when you need to provide proof of purchase, when things go wrong?
As ever what is happening over the pond and particularly what was previewed at the recent NRF show was a topic of general interest. Could an idea like the Adidas information wall where the in store range could be supplemented by technology capable of viewing items in 3D have general use? Would the iPad really be robust enough to withstand retrials usage, or would these devices simply disappear from the store? Who knows but dinner was nearly upon us….
Full of Quail and Venison, we then listened to BT plans for the 2012 Olympics, frighteningly not much more than 500 days way. We learned, how BT is a key sponsor, also commissioned to provide all the telecommunications for the Olympics itself, the visitors and broadcasters, something that had never been done before. With the massive uptake of smart phones, we could only imagine the massive bandwidth requirements, the thousands of miles of cabling and the work this entailed. Our retailers’ attention was held by talk about the opportunities for pop-up shops around the country, at the various council led venues and whether this was practical. Time will tell I guess, but retailers being retailers, I am sure they will find a way.
As the evening drifted on our minds became focussed on more pressing subjects, so we drifted towards the bar and eventually onwards to bed, wondering what it would have been like to live in this house, perhaps every night was a Quail night….
Robin Coles is Director of Supply chain consulting for BT Expedite.
08 Feb
The massive swell of public support for Lush following an announcement that its e-commerce site had been targeted by hackers shows how loyal its customers are to the brand. But the whole episode made it clearer than ever that retailers need to meet the PCI DSS compliance standards – or face the penalties when things go wrong. Not all brands will be able to weather the storm as well as Lush. And while Lush has to be applauded for making the attack public – in line with its values of transparency and honesty – the PCI security standards forum has already started an investigation and a fine seems inevitable.
So how do you avoid getting into the same situation?
The web site was using a payment gateway, as is common practise, so we’re struggling to see the benefit to either the business or its customers of holding such comprehensive customer information that included credit card numbers. We strongly encourage our customers not to do this.
Having worked on PCI DSS related projects over the past three years now, this hacking has reinforced my personal belief that the best way for retailers to be compliant is to start by removing all customer data which has no value. Regarding, card data that is we recommend simply removing all of it from all systems other than the payment gateway.
By doing this you simplify the PCI requirement on day one. The retailer’s payment gateway should then either be updated to include encryption or removed outside of the retailer environment altogether, into a managed / hosted data centre.
If there is a business need and business case to keep any card related data for audit or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) purposes then implement tokenisation. This will ensure that the business need can be met without the risk of keeping the card numbers. This costs money but makes retailing a much less risky business.
Keep it simple and you’ll avoid the pitfalls of card data security.
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About the Author: Kevin Burns is a PCI Consultant for BT Expedite. For more info on PCI, visit our website or contact Kevin.
