Farmacity is one of the major retail store chains in Argentina, with a business model that combines pharma with convenience stores. Since its foundation in 1997, it has consolidated its position as the largest employer of pharmaceutical professionals in the country. With more than 300 stores and two distribution centers, Farmacity employs over 7,000 people.
Before working with InvGate Service Management, Farmacity was using a homegrown ticketing solution. However, this tool was only accessible to its agents and to the IT area alone, so users were still relying on email and phone calls to channel their requests.
This situation presented several issues: high volume of requests, multiple modalities of internal service management, and lack of metrics across the company.
For the implementation of Service Desk, Farmacity selected the infrastructure and technological support consulting firm Expertice, an InvGate certified partner, which continues to accompany them, providing security and support at every step.
"The key factors that made us choose InvGate were that Service Desk is a very intuitive tool, especially for the user. It is based on ITIL guidelines, and it is easily scalable." Marcos Aste Level One Support Efficiency Leader in the Digital Domain at Farmacity |
Since they first started working with Service Desk in 2013, Farmacity experienced exponential growth expanding from 90 stores to more than 300 by 2022. During this growth journey, Farmacity needed to tackle the increasing complexity of its operations.
The area of organizational agility implemented an Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategy to guarantee uniform service delivery, streamline communications between teams, and ensure rapid incident resolution. In this sense, InvGate Service Management's flexibility was crucial to scale operations and efficiently add new areas, stores, and collaborators.
From the support standpoint, this exponential growth meant going from 50 agents to more than 250, from 15 initial help desks to more than 65, and from employing Service Desk only for IT to providing service to more than 10 areas of the company.
"Each area was able to accompany Farmacity's growth by gaining efficiency in its service management and obtaining KPIs, which translated to a 30% saving in the number of agents needed", said Aste.