Interact Retail Edition provides retailers with a powerful solution to manage the internal communications loop with stores

Store communication remains a demanding administrative workload for today’s retailers. Interact Intranet Retail Edition helps manage the communications flow by simplifying and organising information exchange between Head Office, branches, and retail sites.

Interact Retail Edition supports a new sub-licence model which offers retail organisations the chance to engage and involve all staff whether they are head office based or located in retail outlets. Sub-licences can be assigned to users instead of the existing type of full licence. Importantly, a user with a sub-licence still has access to all the features of the intranet; they can access any documents, have their own profile, can fill in forms, and can even be given permission to edit documents if appropriate.

A great advantage of the sub-licence model is that the creation, management and removal of users on sub-licences can be handled by an entirely new role, removing this responsibility from central intranet administrators. For example, in a retail environment, a store manager can be given the ability to maintain the staff working at his particular store.

Importantly, sub-licences offer a much more cost effective way of allowing ‘occasional’ intranet users to access the site as they are available at a lower cost than a full licence. This represents a significant saving for retail operations with potentially thousands of in-store staff who may only require infrequent intranet access.

Nigel Danson, Managing Director at Interact reports that retailers are finding tremendous value in Interact Retail Edition:

“This Head Office to Store relationship is unique and ever increasing in complexity for retail organisations. Getting business critical information to retail outlets quickly and cost effectively can prove to be a challenge; hardcopy and printed communication is complex and expensive, and documents such as manuals and policies are frequently out of date.

“Communication in the retail environment is about effectively executing day-to-day business. Interact Retail Edition is designed to meet this challenge and provide retailers with uncomplicated, fast and efficient communication and user management, allowing them to react to changing business priorities quickly.”

Interact Retail Edition has several distinguishing features that are particularly attractive to retailers:

  • Sub-licence model allowing users without an active directory account to have access to the intranet. Day to day user management of these accounts can be handled in-store reducing the burden on central IT department.
  • Easy to use and manage – intuitive, user friendly interface means staff in stores will be up and running immediately.
  • Actively promotes content such as latest customer offers, promotional plans and competitor information to all staff thus increasing the speed retailers can respond to customer demands and competitor initiatives.
  • Workflow & Forms application which reduces the need for paper, telephone and email in the collection of information from the stores, reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
  • A ‘mandatory read’ facility ensures people have read and understood important information resulting in better customer service due to better-informed sales staff.
  • Enterprise networking tools which actively promote internal communication, collaboration and ideas sharing across retail stores.
  • Media library for all product images, company logos, and commercials

Interact Retail Edition has been designed to streamline the overall complexity of running a retail business and optimise the execution of day-to-day business. The release of Interact Retail Edition underlines Interact’s continued investment in product development and innovative intranet solutions.

About Interact Intranet

Interact is a versatile, fully secure Intranet which can be quickly and easily updated by non-technical users. It seamlessly integrates with other IT applications providing a single one-stop portal for business processes and information such as staff details, news and procedures. The core software comprises a sophisticated range of built-in applications and contains all the features you need for a powerful and flexible strategic intranet which promotes collaboration and communication. A range of sophisticated additional plug-in business software is available to suit key business processes.

The latest version of the software, Interact 4.6, has been developed to take advantage of the latest technologies as used by websites like Facebook and Amazon. Its unique Intelligence Store logs information such as browsing routes, search entries, documents ratings and hits and uses this information to promote content to users. It automatically creates links to other information such as articles, discussions, events and people so that each piece of information is not isolated, but is part of a greater whole – the intranet information store. The more the intranet is used and the more content is added the more powerful and effective it becomes. Powerful enterprise networking tools actively promote internal communication, collaboration, idea sharing and cross-organisation participation.

About Interact

Founded in 1996, Interact is one of the UK’s longest established web development companies. Based in Altrincham, Cheshire, the company specialises in providing the UK’s leading out-of-the box intranet solution, Interact.

With well over a decade of experience Interact has built a solid reputation for both product excellence and outstanding customer service. Organisations using Interact report improved efficiency, greater productivity, increased staff commitment, better decision-making and cost savings. Interact is used by over 300,000 people across a diverse range of clients in both the private and public sectors including HMV, Waterstone’s, Republic, Chelsea Football Club, Tyco ADT, Tradeteam DHL, Amicus, CLIC Sargent, Calor as well as NHS and social housing organisations.