iPass Retail Office: Helping Retailers Get to the Point

The Hallmark Story

Quality communications are what Hallmark is all about. So when Hallmark saw an opportunity to dramatically improve communication between their retail network and corporate headquarters, they jumped on it.

Beginning with a successful pilot program in 2004, Hallmark has since deployed iPass Retail Office service across 480 of its corporate- and independent-owned stores. With a single solution covering a large number of Hallmark's stores, employees at these retail locations enjoy secure, managed broadband connectivity to corporate, plus seamless Internet access. As a result, credit card transactions have been reduced from nearly 45 seconds to only three seconds. POS system software updates have decreased from seven hours to an incredible nine minutes. And overnight store polling has increased in both speed and accuracy to accelerate restocking processes, minimizing out-of-stock situations.

Today, Hallmark is able to keep an eye on competitors and trends while enabling greater productivity at its retail stores, customer insight and employee training. In other words, the customer experience at Hallmark is now the very best.

Learn more about iPass' complete line of turnkey, fully managed fixed-broadband products for branch office, retail office and home office environments.

"iPass offered Hallmark a standard solution for our corporate-owned stores that we were then able to offer our independent retailers. Having a single unified broadband solution that covers both corporate- and independent-owned stores saves us from having to deal with possibly hundreds of individually negotiated services with local cable and DSL operators. What's more, the iPass solution is certified CISP-compliant, enabling high-speed credit card processing over IP. This was one of our top requirements."

-Talli Denney
  Retail Technology Manager
  Hallmark