Meeting the Unique Needs of Our Large Enterprise Customers

Vertical’s Large Enterprise (LE) business is booming—and a big reason that Vertical is so successful. But you may have never heard about how Vertical operates in this space and how our team is able to foster a prosperous partnership with Large Enterprise customers!

Working with LE accounts, most with over 200 locations, requires a lot of moving parts and a lot of team coordination. At the end of the day, though, LE has some of the same pain points, needs, and requirements that a smaller customer has. They just require it at scale. The size of the organization means that the projects are a bit more complicated and demanding. LE demands a more strategic approach to interoperability and monitoring the downstream impact of technology decisions. The extra complexity requires a strategic partner, like Vertical, that helps them get it right. And we take a lot of calls! Maybe it's a strategic question about moving forward with an idea. Or maybe XYZ is blowing up, and the geographic manager is upset. A lot of our effort is keeping the customer happy and delivering a "white glove" experience. When we're interacting with a customer, from the C-level on down, we're looking to help them enjoy the experience to the degree that they want to continue buying and stay customers for many years.

Darrell VanWagner works with most of our largest customers. He's the first line with our customer accounts and works closely with them on any new needs or directives and works hands-on to ensure things go smoothly. One of the consistent trends that he's seeing, especially with our LE retail customers, is active discussions about a move toward the cloud—typically a global market-leading solution, like our purpose-built iPECS-hosted cloud platform. We've been very intentional in how we can overlay retail-specific apps on top of a cloud environment.

We recognized the sensitivity of technology changes at scale—not to mention the cost. Because of this, we provide a dedicated support line, just for our enterprise customers, that goes directly to our LE support team. They expertly handle whatever questions come up and resolve most in real time. For example, perhaps the customer needs a change to their announcement to the store. Because we have a Managed Service Agreement, we’re not constantly building a statement of work or filling out a change request. Time-to-Support is one of the most important things to our customers, and we pride ourselves on meeting those expectations.

Satisfying large customers also means creating and maintaining custom systems. Our warehouse team in Phoenix is involved in building custom systems for our LE customers. The team expedites orders through the factory and then builds and assembles the products based on what the customers have ordered. These systems are uniquely built, imaged, configured, and shipped. The in-house team also handles any product repairs which might be necessary.

Here are some of the notable large projects that we’re currently involved in:

Large Grocers

Maybe you've seen Marty the Robot in your local grocery store, looking for customers to assist or messes to clean up. We’ve helped our large grocery customers, like Ahold Delhaize, interface with these devices such as these to increase sales or operational efficiency. Even though we don't work directly on the development of these robots, we interface them with Wave. For example, Marty can let employees know that a clean-up is needed on Aisle 5. Another device, called "Smart Shelf", uses a camera and AI to watch high-priced items and deliver an alert if someone is lingering too long or grabs too many. With custom integration from Vertical, this device alerts customer service and even sends a text when an event is happening that the employees need to know about.

CVS

Our 21-year partnership with CVS continues to be fruitful. The engineering team is making enhancements to Viewpoint Mobile, the mobile client that we've built and deployed to work on CVS's Point of Sale (POS) devices so even mobile workers in the store can answer calls and handle customer requests. We’re so tightly integrated with CVS that we even connect to their drive-thru and report on the entire customer sales process from the moment they drive in to when the register drawer closes and the transaction ends.