Rossmann cuts store-support handling from 9 minutes to 5 seconds with ServiceNow agentic AI across 5,200 stores

Title

Rossmann cuts store-support handling from 9 minutes to 5 seconds with ServiceNow agentic AI across 5,200 stores

Content

Dirk Rossmann GmbH, the German family-owned drugstore chain operating 5,200 stores across Europe and one of the continent's largest retail employers, deployed agentic AI on top of a ServiceNow Retail Operations mobile app and compressed the time to resolve a single store issue from roughly nine minutes of human back-and-forth across departments to under five seconds end-to-end. The deployment consolidated what had previously been three separate IT, HR and Store Operations systems onto a single ServiceNow platform serving every store associate. Before the deployment, a single manual case averaged nine minutes of human labour across departments. When a store associate discovered, for example, a damaged delivery, the only path was to step away from the sales floor, call headquarters, sit on hold, and work the issue through the phone queue. Tens of thousands of such requests moved through that same slow, fragmented channel every year. "It took time away from the people who matter most: our customers," said Dilara Akbas, a store manager at Rossmann who was the persona around whom the new process was designed. The first milestone was a mobile app on ServiceNow Retail Operations that gave every store associate a direct line to headquarters in their own language, supporting text and voice messages, photo submission and end-to-end case tracking. The bigger shift came when Rossmann layered agentic AI on top of that foundation. The first AI routing agent launched at 56% accuracy. By adjusting knowledge articles, with no model retraining and no engineering overhaul, accuracy climbed above 94% within two weeks. A second ticket-prioritisation agent followed the same curve, from 60% to 94% in the same two-week window. Christian Metzner, Managing Director HR & IT at Rossmann, framed the strategic shift: "If our stores are working, Rossmann is working. We knew that if we wanted to lead the next generation of retail, we needed a single platform—a digital backbone—that could bring our entire enterprise together." Alexander Blanckarts, Head of IT Germany, was direct about the competitive implication: "We are really proud of our strategic partnership with ServiceNow, which puts us in a position to already implement AI agents and new technologies while our competitors are still experimenting." The end-to-end flow now works as follows: the associate opens the mobile app and takes a photo of the damaged product, the AI agent scans the image, identifies the product and classifies the issue, prompts the associate for any missing context such as the delivery date, pulls relevant guidance from the knowledge base and prepares a complete case, then routes the prepared case to the right human agent with everything they need to act. What used to be nine minutes of human back-and-forth is now under five seconds from photo to prepared case, an effective >100x compression in time-to-action, deployed across all 5,200 Rossmann stores in Europe.