Skip to content
Hans Anders Retail Group is a market-leading, value-for-money optical retailer in North-West Europe. The company operates under the Hans Anders, eyes + more and Direkt Optik retail banners, and offers a range of private label and branded spectacles, hearing aids, contact lenses, and sunglasses at average price points significantly below its major competitors. The company was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in the Netherlands. They have around 700 physical stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Sweden.
The Dutch retailer has a brand position: ‘The best service for the best price’ and wanted the Hans Anders motto to apply to their own service organization. The in-house software used by their IT department, and subsequent internal communications, was largely based on emails, and that made it difficult to achieve the desired service levels and make them measurable. Sanne Oosterhoff, Group Operations Director and responsible for supporting store operations, says: “We were an Outlook-driven organization. Each request or incident was received by email, and often several emails followed with questions about the progress of these requests. About 3000 emails a week were received by the store operations support teams.”
Industry
- Retail
Location
- The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Sweden
Challenges
- 700 Stores in a multinational organization and no overarching software to manage their services
Solution
- An integrated Enterprise Service Management solution that connects the stores to the service organization, helping them to continue to grow by providing efficient, on-time services.
“Which departments use 4me? Better ask who is not using it. First, we connected IT and Operations, and then we had to push for the next departments. But soon after, the other department heads asked why they were not connected: Marketing, Facilities, HR, Finance, Logistics. They now all have one entrance: the 4me portal.”
Sanne Oosterhoff, Group Operations Director
Hans Anders
The shops are central to their service organization: staff members may differ from day to day, but the requests and problems remain the same. Asset management is essential for those stores, involving glasses, cash registers, screens, and marketing materials. Hans Anders looked at several solutions both national and international, including 4me. Out of the box, none of these solutions was a 100% match for Hans Anders’ needs, but 4me proved to be the easiest to adapt to the specific requirements of the customer.
4me partner InfraVision took care of the implementation. The solution was ready-for-live within two months. Due to the Coronavirus, the training was initially given online, but it turned out to be so effective that the rest of the organization used the recordings for the remaining employees.
Sanne says about the collaboration with InfraVision: “The collaboration truly felt like a partnership. Right from the start, we sat at the table with people with real know-how. They were able to answer our questions immediately and resolved issues quickly and competently. We even reviewed and improved our workflows together. I have seldom seen a project so well executed.”4
- Request Fulfillment
- Incident Management
- Configuration and Asset Management
- Service Level Management
- Change Management
Hans Anders has already shown a keen interest in adding knowledge management.
The store staff are very positive about 4me, as they can now follow exactly what is happening with their questions and requests. As one of the store owners puts it: “We see that our tickets are quickly picked up and prioritized and that our requests are taken care of on time. But more importantly: with the new system we work more efficiently so that we can devote more time and attention to our customers. It’s fair to say that 4me helps us all to be more successful and to further expand our market leading position.” On average, about 5000 requests are entered into the system per month.
According to Sanne Oosterhoff, the biggest improvement for the service organization is the new Change Management process via 4me. Renovations, opening new stores, and onboarding are processes that run across different departments. These workflows go step by step through the organization and run much smoother than before. 4me is now leading in this, and we can steer much more objectively and tightly. “We are now achieving our goals. Our service to the stores is now fully measurable, and everything measurable will eventually improve.”
“Live translations, in particular, have greatly helped the acceptance in the organization. Anyone can submit requests in their own language. But the intuitiveness of 4me, in general, has been a major factor. And because of that high and fast acceptance, the service level of the entire organization is suddenly crystal clear, and is being increased steadily.”
Sanne Oosterhoff, Group Operations Director
Hans Anders
