As a retailer, you likely invest a lot of time and resources to explore ways to drive revenue growth and foster long-lasting customer partnerships. But what happens when your company suffers a major incident like a data breach? The end result may be a downward spiral that affects your business, its employees and, perhaps most important, its customers.
A data breach may cause downtime and outages and raise questions and concerns about your business. Meanwhile, the media’s coverage of your company’s data breach may lead consumers to shy away from your business’ brick-and-mortar locations.
Let’s not forget about the bottom-line impact of a data breach, either. A data breach may cost your business millions of dollars in lost sales. It also may cause your business to miss its sales goals and exceed its budget as it invests in solutions to regain customers’ trust.
Ultimately, the long-term effects of a data breach will show up in your company’s profit and loss statements, too. The incident may even result in store closures. Yet with incident management software in place, your company can quickly address data breaches and other major incidents.
Incident Management Software for Retailers: Here’s What You Need to Know
To better understand the benefits of incident management software for retailers, let’s consider some of the software’s key features:
- Manual Paging: Send out manual pages from a service desk app and assign groups and bridge numbers.
- Status Updates: Provide in-depth status reports to a service desk in real-time and reach out to multiple teams and end users in just a few clicks.
- Templates: Use pre-built or customizable templates to page out for major incidents.
- Smart Routing: Deliver alerts via SMS, push notifications, emails and other communication methods to ensure the right people are alerted about a major incident.
- Reporting and Analytics: Collect and evaluate incident details, including incident assignments, acknowledgements and escalations.
Brian McIlravey, Executive Vice President of PPM, also highlighted five key benefits of incident management software for retailers in a recent Security Today article. He pointed out the key benefits of incident management software for retailers were:
- End-to-end solution
- Ease of use
- Investigative tools
- Actionable information
- Improved operations
These reasons explain why retailers need to deploy incident management software. Thanks to incident management software, an incident management team can follow-up on incident investigations and escalations. Plus, an incident management team can use the software to obtain valuable feedback and find ways to stop incidents.
Unfortunately, incident management software won’t stop cybercriminals from targeting your business and its critical systems. The software will, however, help your business speed up incident response and resolution following a data breach or any other major incident. It can even help you take a data-driven approach to find the best ways to prevent incidents both now and in the future.
