Retailers need urgently to digitise store management processes, and communications and training as the role of the store worker changes, says Fabrice Haiat, CEO of YOOBIC.
Retailers are dealing with a new reality post-pandemic that is challenging the way they recruit, train, motivate and equip their store staff.
For several years, The British Retail Consortium has been talking about the prospect of fewer but better jobs in retail, as more and more business shift their channel strategy toward online. This problem has suddenly become real and the on/offline channel split looks like it will never return to the way it was. In 2006, the Office for National Statistics put online sales as a percentage of total retail sales at under 5% but now shows that figure has risen to just under 30% in April 2021.
The new economics of lower footfall stores therefore do not allow for high staffing levels but they are an opportunity for retail associate transformation. As the consumer’s journey is increasingly multichannel, staff will need to acquire new skills to manage not just traditional sales and service tasks but assisting with online orders, managing online returns, staging for click and collect, and selling to customers at home through video calls.
Ensuring higher productivity will depend on a more motivated, better organized and better equipped sales associate. After all, customer expectations and product knowledge have risen as a result of their online experience, and post pandemic, these expectations will be even higher.
Fewer staff expected to serve a more demanding customer
The result is low productivity due to a lack of talent as well as expertise and low availability of new recruits. This then becomes a problem of competitiveness and customer loyalty as retailers are unable to provide the experience consumers are seeking. Worse, they expect even better service than ever.
Having spent so much time online over the last year, consumers have become more adept than ever at managing more and more aspects of their lives digitally, and this will see them coming back into stores and premises with much higher expectations.
Salesforce, in a recent survey, suggests that adoption of technology will surge and lists ecommerce, drone delivery, digital contactless payments, video conferencing, autonomous vehicles, wearable health monitors, 3D manufacturing, voice mobile applications, online learning and smart robotics. This immediately raises the game for training, equipping and motivating a workforce that is seeing its roles changing fast, as seen during the pandemic as restaurants pivoted to takeaway, and stores acted as mini warehouses for click and collect.
New tools and techniques needed
For many firms, it is not a problem of finding people but finding experienced people, proving that recruitment, training and staff conditions (not pay) will need to improve. In addition, this will require provision for training inexperienced staff where experience is not available.
The answer is for staff to become more efficient, motivated, and available to serve through greater digitisation of the tools and techniques deployed to support them. Retailers will not only be better positioned to attract, train, and retain the new generation of store staff, but they can cut the current costs of doing so, much of which is consumed in paperwork and manual intervention.
We have identified three main areas that benefit from this approach.
Procedures
Regional and national teams simply do not have the resource to visit every store so it is important to enable them to communicate digitally with stores and get immediate feedback, and then to audit and report on line. Clothing brand Foschini, with 2,300 stores in eight countries deployed Yoobic to cut travelling costs by 11%, cut time traveling and also paperwork.
That paperwork, in the form of Excel spreadsheets and reports, is now all digital and can be accessed in one place alongside emails. This includes proof of compliance to tasks by store staff, which is now done digitally, leaving them free to serve rather than filling reports. Boots for instance, with 2,400 pharmacies, enables its 16,000 staff to demonstrate compliance to merchandising and safety tasks online with YOOBIC.
Targeted digital instructions in the user’s app enables them to report in real time and so resolve issues quickly. Fashion brand Kooples for instance has improved visual merchandising and promotions compliance from 33 to by 90%.
Store communications
Stores are bombarded with communications delivered by email, WhatsApp, calls, etc, many of which are not seen or even ignored. In addition, there is no system to enable staff to distinguish between urgent and non-urgent communications. Moreover, there is no closed loop to make sure they are responded to. BurgerFi with 113 sites in the US, has deployed an app on 3,000 users’ phones to close this loop.
And decorating and DIY specialist, Leyland digitised in-store processes and colleague communication to support its rapid growth serving the professional trade, home renovators and DIY enthusiasts in London. By delivering communication, merchandising and health and safety checklists to colleagues in the flow of work, Leyland SDM has seen an increase in employee engagement across the business.
Jonathan Jennings, Chief Executive of Leyland SDM said, “This gives us the capacity to drive our operations at scale by improving operational efficiency and communication across our network. The platform provides greater visibility across operations and facilitates quick and efficient communication amongst our colleagues. This has encouraged greater knowledge sharing, collaboration and innovation amongst our frontline workers who are responsible for – and central to – delivering the excellent customer experience that is necessary to drive forward the growth of our business.”
Training
Current training approaches mix face to face and digital but are still generally inefficient during onboarding, paper heavy and not positively received by staff themselves. In ourFrontline Employee Workplace Survey 2021, frontline staff said they wanted more training delivered digitally in the flow of work rather than traditional ‘top down’ information and ‘classroom’ style training.
74% said they wanted that training to be mobile, as it would give them control – they could choose when to take the training and access it on their own device, at any time.
Adele de Pimodan, HR Development Manager at Petite Bateau commented: “Mobile learning, in other words YOOBIC, has become very important because it is perfectly adapted to all problems encountered in retail.”
Staff can even post their own content through the app to give them more ownership of their roles. At Tomlinson’s Feed in Texas, the app was a huge hit. People ate up the training, and they were able to retake it if they felt they didn’t retain something, because it’s always accessible for them to go back to.
Automating these everyday processes delivers significant value to the retailer in terms of cost and better customer service given by more motivated staff. Making the change can seem daunting because bad or inefficient processes are always well entrenched within organisations and can be seen as unchangeable. However, staff are saying they want it and research shows that they are enthusiastic to take part, particularly where they can use the app on their own phones.
Ultimately, the goal is an all-in-one digital workplace where staff can communicate, work and learn.
