Trade show focuses retail minds on empowering retail staff as well as attracting and retaining customers
Trade show focuses retail minds on empowering retail staff as well as attracting and retaining customers
Tesco grabbed headlines at the annual ‘Retail Big Show’ held by the National Retail Federation (NRF) in New York this week.
But while many new retail IT project announcements focused on improving the customer experience instore or online, Tesco chose to highlight the deployment of new cloud-based productivity software, Microsoft Office 365.
As a global retailer, it served to turn attention to the importance of workforce management (WFM) strategies in response to economic challenges and consumer demands. Mike McNamara, Tesco chief information officer, told NRF delegates the retailer wants to encourage a cultural shift within the company of embracing more flexible ways of working.
Managing business at scale
Having turned to technology to help standardise and centralise operational decision making in response to its rapid growth, McNamara said the company became “über-efficient”. But international expansion led it to build an internal knowledge sharing tool on the Microsoft SharePoint collaboration platform for staff to manage and communicate local differences and changes.
“Sustaining that change is where Office 365 comes into its own,” he said, “providing a common platform for sharing and learning that is built on top of SharePoint. It will allow our staff to converse across international boundaries to find the best ways to merchandise the value that Tesco brings to each market.”
Empowering an engaged workforce
Time and attendance (T&A) as well as broader WFM vendors were in broadly endorsed the Tesco move strategically. “The trends at NRF have all been around social media, big data and mobile,” commented Andrew Busby, retail account director at WFM expert Kronos Systems. “And it’s not just about customer expectations that these technologies affect but employee ones too. Many of the retailers we speak to are looking to increase customer engagement.”
Barney Quinn, chief executive of growing WFM vendor Workplace Systems, said: “Retailers in the UK continue to look at how they can improvement the management of staff costs and they want fact implementations. Cloud-based systems like ours can de-risk deployments.” He added that they were different trends according to the retailer’s size.
“The smaller the retailer is, the more they are interested in cost,” Quinn continued. “The larger ones and talking more about right-sizing their workforces for ‘clienteling’ and increasing employee engagement through the likes of shift bidding via social media, for example.”
Mobilising multichannel operations
Kronos was at NRF to showcase its latest retail WFM products, like its new store task management module, Manhattan Associates integration for analysing the impact of multichannel services, like click and collect, on store and distribution staffing levels and the introduction of its workforce tablet analytics offering in partnership with MicroStrategy.
“We are seeing a trend in requirements from retailers that want to make sure they can provide a service and particular expansion into services like technical support. But it is mobile apps that are having the most effect. Investing in IT like our tablet analytics releases store and regional managers to interact with customers and store staff more on the shop floor,” concluded David Bacon, Kronos Systems core markets sales manager.
The upcoming January/February 2013 issue of Retail Technology magazine will feature a more in-depth interview with Mike McNamara. Contact us to subscribe here. In the meantime, review all the Retail Technology online reports from NRF 2013 here.
