Retail Workforce Management Solutions That Accelerate Execution and Communication

The retail workforce is key to retailers’ success in a disruptive environment. But modern store employees need real-time solutions to adapt to ever-changing environments. Retail employees are increasingly stretched, whether it’s customer data at their fingertips to personalize the experience or tools to manage new forms of payment such as curbside pickup. And workforce engagement has become paramount to retaining frontline associates in a tight labor market.

Explore how retailers can leverage technology to set up their staff for success and what tools are needed for workers to get employees to do their jobs effectively and enhance the employee and customer experience.

What is retail workforce management?

Workforce Management in retail refers to all the processes revolving around organizing and distributing the workforce and tasks at retail locations to ensure smooth retail execution and minimize costs.

Workforce management (WFM) strategically optimizes employees’ productivity to ensure that all resources are in the right place at the right time. A workforce management approach often incorporates scheduling, forecasting, skills management, time and attendance, and employee accountability. The complexity increases with the need to ensure that customer service supports omnichannel customer engagement.

Discover how retailers can succeed with modern workforce management technologies

Time and Attendance

Workforce management tracks time and analyzes employee attendance patterns to help retail stores manage issues related to predictable losses in employee coverage. Retailers can maximize capacity and improve efficiency at point-of-sale in many ways by handling the average amount of time for an employee to handle customer queries. To track time and analyze attendance patterns in the retail industry, digital processing of days off, absences, and time recording is essential.

Real-Time Communication/ Messaging

Efficient in-store communication is vital for retail success. With current labor shortages threatening in-store efficiency, every staff member is critically important to the customer experience. Empower your employees with the tools to improve associate engagement and transform your retail operation.

Equip your employees with voice technology that allows them to access real-time information regarding daily store operations, inventory, product expertise, schedules, etc. Send them daily pep talks or messages of encouragement to keep them motivated. Retailers should not ignore their employee’s experiences. Invest in your frontline staff, and they will invest in you.

Task Management

Employee engagement is vital today, and the competitiveness of the tight labor market is driving many retailers to be innovative. Most retail store operations found that the rate of on-time task completion jumped when they deployed real-time task management.

ChainDrive Real-Time Task Manager simplifies and streamlines on-site execution and communication by providing a 360-degree, real-time view of all work to be performed at your locations. Real-Time Task Manager ensures that all work is automatically prioritized according to best practices by centralizing tasks generated by retail managers, on-site staff, IoT devices, and third-party systems in the intuitive work interface. So, managers at all levels can track completion rates in real-time.

Enhance Employer Branding

To attract and retain young talent in the retail industry and decrease a high turnover rate, improving employer branding is essential to enhance the existing organizational culture and internal policies and communicate this image to the outside world. Feedback and personal growth monitoring are crucial to retaining staff and increasing employer brand awareness.

ChainDrive’s employee satisfaction and performance software is tailored to the needs of retailers and allows for the implementation of targeted HR marketing measures for an excellent work climate.

Omnichannel Workforce Management

While labor shortages and rising wages are not unique to the retail industry, what is distinctive to retail is the new set of responsibilities being placed on its shrinking workforce. Over the past decade, and accelerated by the pandemic, retailers have introduced various omnichannel services to their stores to blur the distinction between digital and physical retailing and make the shopping journey more convenient for consumers. Delivering these omnichannel services quickly, seamlessly, and accurately requires seamless communication between employees, management, and the business to ensure order information is disseminated to frontline staff accurately and promptly. A commitment to communicating with store staff via a multitude of channels aligns perfectly with retailers’ technology-driven workforce strategies.

Managing an omnichannel workforce with ChainDrive solutions allows you to continuously optimize the customer experience, along with these other benefits:

• Reduce operational costs through improved cross-team efficiency.
• Use skill-based routing to ensure customers are connected with the right expert.
• Apply front- and back-office integration for complete customer history and personalized customer service.

Education and Training

As the responsibilities of retail employees increase and recruiting and retaining talent is a top priority in the industry, retailers are taking a hard look at their training approach. Associates need more Training than ever to ensure they can multitask with ease and fully capitalize on the next-gen technology they are being equipped with.

In addition to preparing associates for their current jobs, a successful training program will plant the seeds of growth within the organization. By providing retail employees with the skills, they need to advance within the organization; retailers significantly increase the likelihood that new hires will stay for the long term. While most associates receive sufficient Training to learn the basics of their jobs before being thrown into the retail fray, many retailers feel that the current training level is insufficient. Training and development of existing staff to undertake new tasks is, therefore, one of the fundamental requirements of successful businesses.

Work Scheduling

Flexible scheduling is the second most important benefit for retail workers after wage increases. In light of recent disruptions, retailers have adopted new workforce management strategies such as allowing employees to swap schedules, offering more flexible schedules, and increasing incentives to encourage employees to stay.

The ChainDrive workforce management platform optimizes workforce efficiency and employee engagement simultaneously. It delivers a return on investment (ROI) through schedule optimization, reduced attrition, increased productivity, and reduced compliance costs. Empower your staff to own their shifts and efficiently manage the team across multiple locations with ChainDrive.

The real-time data will make you revamp your workforce scheduling and rethink your store operating hours. To solve the workforce problem, retailers are turning to technology, upping their investment in in-store retail workforce management software.

Commission and Incentives

If you want to compensate your employees fairly, you need a commission engine to determine how much each employee should be paid based on draws, salaries, commissions, and bonuses.

Retailers use sales incentive programs to motivate their employees and increase the overall productivity of salespeople in their stores. The workforce management system calculates and reports sales commissions, so you can easily reward top performers. By incentivizing employees to increase their productivity, retailers can increase revenue in their stores. Integrate your accounting department with your compensation programs to keep your employees as happy as your customers.

Conclusion

Ongoing disruption has made attracting and retaining high-demand retail associates extremely difficult. In response, leading retailers are increasing their technology spending and investing in the digital tools needed to engage with their staff and allow them to shine in the fast-paced and evolving retail store.

Workforce management has come a long way, and new technologies abound to help retailers attract and retain top talent. Training, engagement, and communication are essential to prepare associates for success. Happier employees lead to lower turnover and a better customer experience.

Empower a Next-Gen workforce by optimizing labor costs and simplifying the work of store associates

Retailers today are under more pressure than ever. Between persistent labor shortages and rising customer expectations, store associates are being asked to do more work with fewer resources, a challenge that risks demoralizing employees and lowering retention rates. With disruption becoming the new normal, store employees must be agile and adaptable, able to shift tasks and projects instantly to respond to changing conditions in real-time.

With ChainDrive’s task management and workforce management solutions, you can optimize everything, streamline your store operations, and ensure that your associates have the tools they need to be productive and efficient in the store. Become an employer of choice and ensure you foster a next-gen workforce that can handle any challenge and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

With ChainDrive Retail Workforce Management Software, you can

• Reduce overhead by integrating multi-store retail operations and by using Real-Time Task Manager to intelligently direct tasks to the relevant on-site associates.
• Simplify task execution with real-time task management, prioritizing activities, and providing store associates with a single list of action items on their mobile devices.
• Streamline enterprise-to-store communication with real-time, peer-to-peer messaging.
• Optimize workforce forecasting and scheduling with real-time data-driven workforce management, aligning staff to in-store workload, customer traffic, employee availability, and other key variables.
• Improve employee engagement and retention by streamlining work and providing employees with flexible and adaptable work schedules.

Find out how ChainDrive can address the unique challenges of your store operations and provide you with the right technology you need to succeed.

Book a demo and ask our experts how to empower your frontline workers and optimize your omnichannel workforce.