The contract will see BT Expedite install its Connected Retailer multichannel system for Charles Clinkard, including Mercatus central merchandising, Store 6 point-of-sale, integrated store and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
Charles Clinkard’s growth and continuing focus on multichannel retailing has resulted in the need for the retailer to integrate more of its online and in-store activities. The current legacy systems require significant manual processing to provide activities such as click and reserve; BT Expedite’s integrated store offering pulls different channels together seamlessly.
Retail integration projects are typically complex, but when choosing a supplier it was important to Charles Clinkard that the installation project could take place without business interruption. Charles Clinkard also wanted to ensure that systems were ‘future proof’ and would continue to be invested in without significant input from its IT team. Over a period of 18 months, Charles Clinkard looked at a number of competitive solutions and chose BT Expedite after seeing that it was already meeting these requirements for a range of other household retail names.
Charles Clinkard, Charles Clinkard’s managing director, said: “We looked at the market, reviewing a wide variety of different solutions, in a search for the best retail systems in the industry. We have chosen BT Expedite as we believe that it is a very good fit for our business requirements, in terms of product, people and how our systems will be updated for future needs.
“This is a complex project, but having seen what BT Expedite has already achieved with some of Britain’s most famous retailers, we’re very confident that we will have new systems that will help our staff, whilst providing a superior, customer experience across all channels. Crucially, we believe that BT Expedite’s years of experience will enable the implementation to be completed without any interruption to business flow during installation.”
Geoffrey Barraclough, director of strategy and marketing at BT Expedite, said: “We’re delighted that Charles Clinkard selected BT Expedite after such thorough research amongst our competitors. The fact that we have the people who developed these products and our commitment to continual improvement continues to pay off for us. We’re looking forward to the installation project and the chance to work with a company of such great heritage.”