Christopher Lloyd, Facilities Manager at EssilorLuxottica UK, joins the Comparesoft Facilities Management Podcast to discuss the reality of maintaining over 700 high-street retail stores across fashion and optical healthcare brands.

Drawing on over 12 years in retail and wholesale facilities management, Chris explains how FM teams protect the customer experience at scale, why communication and transparency matter more than perfection, and what he has learned from rolling out a new self-managed CAFM system across his entire estate.

In this episode, Chris talks about:

• How FM teams prioritise thousands of incoming work requests across 700+ stores
• Why health and safety, operational disruption, and customer experience form the priority structure for triaging reactive maintenance
• How fashion brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley raise the bar for store presentation and preventive maintenance
• The differences between managing optical healthcare environments and traditional fashion retail
• What a self-managed CAFM system delivers compared to a vendor-led platform, including price intelligence and contractor assignment
• The importance of first-time fix rates and why reducing revisits matters more than headline SLAs
• Practical advice for anyone stepping into a multi-site retail FM role for the first time

🔗 Listen and read more: https://comparesoft.com/facilities-management-software/facilities-manager/retail/