In today’s connected buyer journey, retail sales are the primary drivers of physical retail success. Ensuring their continued success and productivity is essential to create lasting competitive advantage. We are moving towards a “new normal” as businesses start to open up again. Most retailers would have experienced disruption in sales revenue, and as we continue with ongoing uncertainty, it has never been more important to fix your cost base and improve your productivity. Keep your colleagues and customers safe in your store. It could be a more frequent cleaning activity or colleagues managing customer flows to follow social distancing. These are not negotiable and will increase the workload and associated costs. Encourage customers to adopt the right behaviours. This will reduce the need for constantly monitoring them. You can intervene when required.
Having separate entry and exit doors and planning a one-way route around the store can help. This is easiest to do in a grocery store type environment where layouts lend themselves to a clear trail around the store. It is more difficult to achieve in a browsing style layout of a retail store. If you make any changes to the layout, consider their impact on the efficiency of your operation. Traffic counting technology is being reoriented to help stores manage the number of in-store customers and even monitor the flow of customers through the store to maintain social distancing. These solutions could help cut time spent to limit the total number of clients.
Older customers, who remain more at risk, would be more careful and may spend less time in shops and cafes than before. Some customers, being afraid of malls and places might just stay back at home. If your customer behaviour changes, you will need to review how you operate and how best to generate income.
These are some tips to increase your retail efficiency:
Match your inventory levels to needs
Excess inventory creates more work in the store. When the stock exceeds the holding of the workshop, it must be moved and counted several times. The ideal situation is that the delivered items go straight to the workshop so that your team touches them only once when it is time to display them. Count how your team touches an item before it’s sold and identify what you can do to eliminate the touches.
Streamline process
Your employees will become more productive when processes are streamlined, and they can gain daily tasks and expectations assigned to them. They will be able to focus more on the quality of what they produce when unnecessary tasks are reduced.
Customer satisfaction
It is important to remember that it is not just the employees themselves who can be tracked to monitor the productivity of the workforce. Customer satisfaction levels can provide a unique insight into the ability of staff to achieve their goals and act productively from a consumer perspective. While collecting customer feedback is arguably easier for e-commerce businesses, it is still possible to do so in physical stores. Retailers might consider offering incentives to complete online surveys after purchase, such as entering sweepstakes or getting early access to new products.
Eliminate all non-essential tasks
Most businesses have administrative and compliance checks that are fun to perform or that were started years ago and have become an ingrained habit. Review your operation for tasks that take time and don’t generate sales.
Review what you did during the height of the crisis
Most retailers who traded during this lockdown have adopted changes they would not have considered in more normal times. If you’ve changed your way of doing things and streamlined your operations, think carefully before reintegrating activities into the store directory.
Our final tip is to remember that being productive isn’t just about cutting costs, it’s about doing more with your existing resources. In today’s competitive industry, do whatever you can to gain an advantage. Your workforce can be a big part of it.
At Norin, we ensure employee productivity, encouraging them to gain knowledge about current market trends, futuristic technologies. Our products and services are helping us to maintain a good customer relationship. If you have any ideas, please share your comments.
