Improving internal customer service within retail

In 2018, we were asked to take over the support/management of the iPhones that were used in the pharmacies that delivered medication to patients, as they're discharged, in the hospitals we partner with. This is a service called Meds-to-Beds.

The iPhones had been deployed about a year earlier but were not managed in any way. They were set up as personal devices with restrictions placed on them via the Settings app according to a nine-page/36-step instruction document. This also meant that when there was an issue, or if a phone was wiped after too many incorrect password attempts, the iPhones had to be mailed to our staging center, manually reconfigured, and then mailed back to the pharmacy. This process was lengthy, prone to error, and caused long delays for service.

Because we didn't have Jamf Pro in the cloud at the time, we had to make our first visits to the pharmacies in-person to configure the phones with Apple Configurator. And on my visit to the first pharmacy that day, I discovered that they had sent in a phone to be reconfigured a month earlier and had no idea where it was told me that they thought I would have brought it back. They had been borrowing a phone from another pharmacy to get by. The second pharmacy had a non-working iPhone, but didn't want to call it in until they received the iPhone they'd lent out back. My team found this pattern of trading common at the stores, primarily because they didn't trust IT to handle their issues quickly or reliably. The pharmacy business area was just as irritated because they saw this as something that should be easier because, after all, they chose iPhones based on their ease of use. Overall, the rollout and mismanagement of iPhones had created a rift in the relationship between the retail locations, the business area, and IT.

We used this as one of the primary reasons to move our JSS to the cloud even though we had just set up an on-prem JSS one year earlier. It took some time to get the engineering right, but now the iPhones can be configured in the pharmacies using zero-touch workflows and the support can be handled remotely. We've also repaired and improved, the relationship with both the pharmacy business area AND the retail locations. It's also helped justify expanding the program to other hospitals because we can now support more devices. In fact, last year we rolled out more phones to support mobile vaccine clinics to help give the retail locations some cover as COVID-19 vaccinations were going to take a large chunk of time in the stores.