First-class system for retailer pays for itself

For specialist retailer 2nds World, operating across three stores and a headquarters location provided some communication challenges. Firstly, they had a serious spam email problem, with hundreds of messages arriving every day. Like many small to medium organisations, there was no in-house IT team, so each morning the firm’s financial controller was spending two hours before the start of business checking through all the bogus mail to separate it from legitimate sales enquiries.

Secondly, the company’s internet-based inventory system was experiencing performance problems. Stores seeking the location of an item needed to use the internet to search the stock database at headquarters. However, internet connectivity often appeared to be slow or was timing-out entirely, resulting in wasted time or loss of sales when customer enquiries could not be satisfied.

2nds World had spent a lot of money continually upgrading its internet connection and paying consultants to tinker with their inventory software, but this did not seem to offer an improvement in traffic speed and bandwidth quotas were regularly being exceeded, resulting in further costs.

The solution to these issues was to have their IT support provider Geforce Technologies install the NetAssure managed network service. The mail sanitisation functions of NetAssure proved an effective answer to the spam email issue, immediately freeing up two hours a day of a senior manager’s time.

Furthermore, NetAssure’s content filtering and usage monitoring capabilities pinpointed the reason for the bandwidth consumption and slowness of the company’s internet systems: employees were regularly downloading huge media files such as films and music. There was no problem with the inventory solution itself, it was just that the network connections were being impacted by inappropriate data usage.

“NetAssure was installed overnight and had an immediate positive effect upon our business,” said Jai Narayan, Financial Controller at 2nds World.

NetAssure allowed management to selectively restrict employees’ access to websites and content not appropriate to their particular business function. With the knowledge that their internet usage had been behind some of the issues and that this was now being monitored more closely, employees became much more responsible in their approach. The result was an increase in employee productivity and an immediate significant drop in bandwidth consumption.

Bandwidth cost savings alone has more than covered the investment in NetAssure.

The management of 2nds World estimates an overall productivity increase since the implementation of NetAssure of about 15% across the organisation. This equates to $300,000 a year saved in staff costs, without even factoring in improved sales figures and customer satisfaction.

“Everyone’s looking for good value for their money these days and the NetAssure system allows us to deal with customer enquiries more effectively and keep our prices low.

“I’d recommend it to any organisation that wants to get control of their internet usage and save money,” said Narayan.