While online is eating away at how you used to know retail, a countermovement is happening. The consumer doesn’t see it. And the question is not ‘Should you join?’. The question is ‘When should you join?’
So what does it even mean to operate more like online? Well, let’s start off by looking at why online is efficient. Online shopping is accessible from anywhere, it is automated, you can quickly look at a huge collection of similar products for comparison in quality and price. And you can connect your preferences for future interactions thus easing transaction and effort.
So how does that relate to retail operations?
When professionals started using the Internet, retailers were still phoning each other on landlines, driving out to all stores to check campaigns, getting instructions from guideline binders, taking notes on pads, filling out paper checklists, and writing up reports (that often just collected dust in filing cabinets).
The ironic thing is that a lot of those principles still remain.
Only now, there’s mobile phones, laptops with pdfs, emails, spreadsheets and intranets with hopeless folders structures. One thing is still the same though. In many cases, the channels and tools used today are detached from one another, they demand manual action, they slow down processes and give rise to unclarity and uncertainty.
So what if your organisation took after principles of online? Maybe if you took all your head office departments, area managers, all your stores, all the store visit sheets, work orders, guidelines for campaigns, brand etc – and you connected each of them in one big ‘brain’.
Because if your business operated more like the neural network of a brain with all the automation herein – just like online benefits from – then the sum of all the effective processes will enable you to deliver better at what online can never do:
Providing the unique personal customer experience with real people that has always formed the basis of traditional retail.
Time consumption cut in half
"Today, conducting a check is significantly faster than before, and I get access to the reports straight away. In fact, we have cut our time consumption in half in this connection. On top of that, we now know exactly where we fail and where we succeed. This is a huge advantage."
Jonas Muff, Dagrofa
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