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Retailers must look at new ways to impact sales and customer service, and one way to achieve a positive outcome is getting store employees to attend work with the right attitude. Employee engagement can improve dramatically with an effective cloud‐based
workforce management solution where employees are given more choice and control of when they work. The technology for fostering employee engagement is here and it is quick and easy to implement, and what’s more employees use it because they are familiar with consumer‐based devices or concepts. For instance shift‐offering via Facebook, Twitter and SMS allows retailers to quickly advertise available shifts and their employees can view, accept or swap on their terms, at a time they choose, using any device they want to. The ability to enable employees to manage their own schedules ensures the appropriate staff are in the right place at the right time with the right attitude, leading to, among other things, optimum levels of customer service and increased sales.
Barney Quinn, CEO, Workplace
Retail used to be about managing stock into stores better than anyone else– massive stock ranges would give customers inspiration and drive sales from the store. Nowadays customers are far more sophisticated and any brand/retailer can sell pretty much the same stock to anyone via the web. This makes the idea of large amounts of stock sitting in lots of large stores pretty redundant. Increasingly important is how retailers understand their customer and sell effectively to them. Whilst stock and sales are the same side of the same coin, historically we have built up massive stock that customers have bought from. Nowadays customers are deciding for themselves what’s interesting.
Howard Langer, Head of Pricing and Promotions, Itim Retail
we are seeing in retail today is only the beginning. Soon it will be
hard to even define eCommerce, with the lines of in‐store and online becoming increasingly blurred. Is it an eCommerce sale if the customer goes to a store, finds that the product is out of stock, and uses an in store terminal to have another location ship it to their home? As digital retailing evolves, it is quickly morphing into something so
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different that it requires a new name: Omnichannel retailing, where stores are evolving into shop fronts, with more and more consumers using stores to ‘try before they buy’ before completing their transaction online.
Tony Bryant, Head of Business Development, K3 Retail
What
The concept of prompted selling, via digital displays, will continue to grow in popularity on the high street as retailers and brands invest in aiding customers when making their purchasing decisions, effectively channelling them to a particular product and taking the guesswork out of shopping.
Digital screens are one means of facilitating prompted selling, and even those stores that are more traditional in their approach and values will come to adopt these and other types of retail technology to make shopping easier, more exciting and interactive for the customer and also
open up new sales opportunities.
Other types of advanced retail technology, from holograms to augmented reality, will be a standard feature in retail environments in the future and will be notable more for their absence than their presence.
Duncan Hill, Managing Director, HL PPE
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