John Lewis transforms employee and customer experience with Appian’s BPM Cloud Work platform

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: John Lewis transforms employee and customer experience with Appian’s BPM Cloud Work platform.

Appian, the business process management (BPM) and Case Management software provider, has announced that John Lewis, the largest department store retailer in the UK, deployed its first application on the Appian Cloud platform. The application, called "Customer Project Management (CPM)," is used by John Lewis employees (known as Partners in this co-owned business) to accelerate and modernise how customer orders are managed and fulfilled for Fitted Kitchens, Floor Coverings and Made to Measure Curtains and Blinds. This new solution is part of the John Lewis ambition to further improve and optimise the customer journey through digitisation, automation, data and analytics.

"With Appian our Partners can make each customer interaction more effective and productive, access the right data, and the whole process is visible at every stage of the customer journey," said Mark Fishman, Project Manager, Retail Operations Development, John Lewis. "This supports our Omni-Channel aspirations and is all about: smarter decisions, faster action, and more transparency to deliver the best customer experience. Appian has also enabled us to access customer information on a mobile device."

John Lewis Partners are able to use Appian to manage customer case specifications and communicate case status in order to create a more seamless customer experience. The full lifecycle of the sale and delivery is monitored and can be changed to take account of customer requirements and internal priorities. Important events such as home inspections, contractor fulfilment, and final case wrap up are all handled through the Appian application. Every order becomes a new component of the customer's record. In this way, Appian not only accelerates the process and ensures quality, but also provides meaningful analytics on the overall customer experience for trend analysis.

The Appian BPM Suite is a modern Work Platform that empowers all employees in an organisation to make smart and efficient decisions, and take rapid business action. Appian discovers and unites enterprise data, connects users through social and collaborative engagement in the context of business data, and provides the leading BPM platform to execute business processes, enforce rules, and ensure all actions taken by users are in accordance with corporate policies and procedures. Appian delivers its full suite capabilities on-premise and in the cloud, on the desktop and natively on all major mobile device platforms.

"Critical to the Retail Industry is maintaining the customer experience whilst constantly enhancing the quality of service being offered. Knowing your customers and making smarter decisions based on the knowledge and data gathered is also key and forever evolving," said Vikki Hailey, Regional Vice President UK & Ireland. "John Lewis Partnership has recognised the need to automate and modernise business operations through Appian's Work Platform and this displays a strong commitment to their focus on Customer Service excellence."