Supporting Europe's largest stores demands more than a phone line

In 1972, Dirk Rossmann opened the first self-service drugstore in Germany on a simple belief: remove every barrier between people and what they need. The industry thought it wouldn’t work. It worked, and it changed how Europe shops.

Fifty years later, that same instinct is driving a different kind of transformation—this time, inside the operation that supports the sales floor. At ROSSMANN’s scale, that barrier was this: every time something went wrong in a store, a manager like Dilara Akbas had one option: step away from the floor, call headquarters, sit on hold, and work through the issue over the phone.

“It took time away from the people who matter most: our customers,” Dilara recalls.

A single manual case averaged nine minutes of human labor across departments. Data lived in silos: IT, HR, and Store Operations each ran separate systems with no shared view of what was happening across the business. Tens of thousands of requests annually, each one moving through this same slow, fragmented channel.

“If our stores are working, Rossmann is working,” says Christian Metzner, Managing Director HR & IT at Rossmann. Keeping 5,200 stores working required a single platform that could connect them all.

A single app replaces the phone queue, putting store support in every associate’s pocket

That conviction drove the decision to consolidate everything on ServiceNow. As Christian puts it, the team wanted a partner that would innovate alongside them, not just a vendor delivering a fixed solution. “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,” he explains.

The result was a mobile app, built on ServiceNow Retail Operations, that gave every store associate a direct line to headquarters, without needing to leave the sales floor or disrupt their flow of work. For the first time, associates could simply report issues by text or voice message in their own language, quickly submit photos as part of a case, and track the status of every request from open to resolved. The back-and-forth that used to span hours was replaced by a single interface that fit in a pocket.

“The store associates can now easily use the app to address their concerns to our headquarters, save time, and have more time to be there for our end customers,” says Alexander Blanckarts, Head of IT Germany.

ROSSMANN moves into agentic AI, and the results surprise even the team running the project

The bigger shift came when ROSSMANN layered agentic AI on top of that foundation. Instead of routing requests to a human agent and waiting, the system began handling them end-to-end. The first AI routing agent launched at 56% accuracy. By adjusting knowledge articles—no retraining, no engineering overhaul—it climbed above 94% within just two weeks. The ticket prioritization agent followed the same curve: from 60% to 94% in the same time window. Two separate agents with the same rapid improvement.

“I didn’t fully believe it was real,” says Christian.

Alexander is direct about what it means competitively. “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.”

AI agents resolve store issues autonomously, cutting nine minutes of back-and-forth to under five seconds

When a store associate discovers a damaged delivery today, the entire process, from photo to prepared case, happens in the time it used to take just to reach someone at headquarters.

Here’s how it works:

• 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
• If information is missing, like a delivery date, for example, the AI agent prompts the associate to provide it
• The AI agent pulls relevant guidance from the knowledge base and prepares a complete case
• The fully prepared case is routed to the right human agent, with everything they need to act
• For other support cases like resolving login issues, that is handled autonomously from end-to-end by the AI Agent

“The AI agent independently analyzes, prioritizes, and implements the measures to close the ticket,” says Christian. “What could once take up to nine minutes of back-and-forth now takes less than five seconds. It’s effectively instantaneous.”

For Dilara, the change is less about the numbers. “Everything is resolved automatically. As a store manager, I don’t have to go back and forth with headquarters anymore. If a pallet arrives damaged, I document it in seconds and head back to the sales floor. The app gives us the freedom to be there for the customers.”

AI accuracy reaches 98% as ROSSMANN projects €20–30 million in annual operational savings

Accuracy in routing tickets to the right teams has now climbed to 98%, even exceeding accuracy from humans, with 89% of all incoming tickets now correctly categorized and prioritized automatically, across more than 200 service categories that previously required trained agents to sort manually. The new workflow has also driven a 50% reduction in labor costs on AI-handled cases, with Rossmann estimating 2–3% savings in overall operational costs, the equivalent of €20–30 million annually.

“An absolute success criterion was routing tickets to the right people,” says Alexander Roj, AI Product Owner. That criterion has been met, and the system keeps improving with use. For store associates like Dilara, that means less time managing problems and more time with the customers who walk in looking for help.

1,500 person-hours have already been returned to the business, and the company projects 10,000 hours annually as more branches and knowledge connect to the platform. Every store that gets added to the platform increases the savings.

Up next: AI Voice Agents and real-time store intelligence will anchor phase two.

Phase two is already in motion, where all elements of the platform—HR Service Delivery, IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, and Retail Service Management, and Retail Operations—will be enhanced with AI. Rossmann is also piloting AI Voice to support its workforce that spans more than 100 nationalities.

“Using your voice is another way to help people even better,” says Christian. “We want to ensure that every associate, regardless of their native language, gets the support they need instantly.”

The company is also exploring how real-time sensor data from stores can be combined with inventory data to surface the next best action before a customer notices a problem—telling a store team exactly when to open a new register or which shelf needs restocking, decided by AI and delivered to the person who needs it.

A fifty-year instinct for moving first, now applied to the future of retail operations

At its core, the ambition hasn’t changed since 1972: make it easier for people to get what they need. The difference is that today, the friction ROSSMANN is removing is within their employees operational experience, allowing them to focus their time where it matters most, on the store floor, serving customers. The people getting their time back are the ones who were always supposed to have it.

“I’m really proud of the speed of implementation,” says Christian. “ServiceNow put great people on our project and connected us to other customers so we could learn quickly. But it also required the courage to take risks.”

For a family-owned business that has been taking those risks for fifty years, that part comes naturally. With already six AI Agents live, the future looks bright.

“"We’re really just getting started,” Christian concludes. “Three years from now, we will look back at this as the moment we truly connected the heart of the operation--our stores—to the rest of the business.”