Industry
Retail
Omnichannel Experience & Intelligent – The Future of Retail
Highlights
- An enriched employee experience is not just a nice-to-have. It has become a business imperative that directly influences customer experience and loyalty.
- Retailers must leverage technology to train employees; speed up the onboarding process; and equip them with a deeper understanding of products, systems, and customer service practices.
- The integration of technology to enhance employee experience will foster a cycle of improvement that can elevate all aspects of a retail operation.
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Why employee experience matters
In today’s competitive retail landscape, creating a seamless and personalized customer experience is more critical than ever.
Yet, a crucial element often overlooked in achieving this goal is the experience of the retail employees themselves. A positive employee experience is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a business imperative that directly influences customer satisfaction and loyalty. When retail employees feel valued, empowered, and engaged, they are more likely to go that extra mile, delivering exceptional customer service that fosters long-term relationships with customers and enhances their overall shopping experience. Investing in a supportive and enriching work environment for retail employees can transform the customer experience, driving both employee satisfaction and business success. From personalized interactions to enhanced service delivery, the far-reaching impact of a good employee experience is undeniable and essential for any retailer aiming to stand out in a crowded market.
However, the retail industry in the UK is currently facing a shortage of workers due to socio-economic changes and increased labor churn because of changing career preferences among younger generations. Retailers are struggling to attract and retain high-quality talent. Additionally, it takes around three-and-a-half weeks to onboard new retail employees and about three months for them to become fully functional. The labor shortage has led to understaffed stores, longer queues, a shortage of assistance on the floor, and fatigue and stress among existing store employees. This is negatively impacting customer experience, potentially leading to lost sales.
Retailers must focus on retaining existing employees and attracting new ones by creating an amenable work environment. To support their business and enhance the employee experience, retailers are turning to technology solutions. The integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and IoT has the potential to empower employees, leading to increased job satisfaction and improved customer service.
We explore how technology-driven solutions can create impactful change in the retail workspace.
Faster onboarding and upskilling through AR-VR
Retailers must use augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to create interactive training environments for their employees.
These immersive training sessions can help store colleagues gain a deeper understanding of products, systems, customer service, and operational procedures, thereby accelerating the onboarding process.
Employees focused on sales will benefit tremendously from this comprehensive product knowledge. For instance, new employees can receive training that involves visualizing product features and understanding their benefits, which leads to more effective sales pitches and customer interactions. Additionally, AR-VR-based troubleshooting and self-help solutions can significantly reduce the time taken to resolve in-store infrastructure issues. Retailers must leverage AR-VR to create immersive training environments, enabling employees to learn in interactive settings.
Collaborative tools for bridging the communication gap
Mobile apps and platforms can enable real-time communication and sharing of updates, fostering enhanced teamwork and communication among retail employees.
This will not only ensure smooth operations but will also create a more cohesive and collaborative work environment. For example, if the business team plans a promotional sale, the workers at the fulfillment end are updated about the potential influx of customers and orders due to it.
Feedback platforms integrated into mobile apps will allow employees to voice their concerns, offer suggestions, or report escalations instantly. This will ensure any challenges faced by employees are addressed promptly, leading to a more positive work environment. One of the main challenges in the retail industry is shift scheduling. By using generative AI (GenAI), retailers can analyze employee data on preferences, availability, workload, and skillsets to create an optimized schedule that assigns tasks to the most suitable employees, minimizing scheduling conflicts.
Enabling seamless operations
By integrating technology in retail operations, firms can improve day-to-day processes and tasks handled by retail employees.
Traditional inventory management is prone to human errors and can be tedious. Leveraging technologies such as RFID and IoT can ease logistical challenges. With AI-driven solutions, employees can easily predict demand, optimize stock levels, and automate reordering processes. For instance, smart shelves with IoT sensors can detect low-stock items and automatically send reordering requests. This will minimize the chances of stockouts and overstock, reducing stress and guesswork among employees.
Additionally, technology systems can enable employees to efficiently manage stock operations, including receiving, counting, picking, and transfers. Guided navigation in the warehouse and stores can further improve employees' accuracy and efficiency, allowing them to focus more on strategic decisions.
Enabling store colleagues to help customers
Customers today have access to a lot of information about the products they intend to buy.
This makes it important for store employees to enhance their role and provide customers with additional knowledge to help them make better buying decisions. Recent research shows that more than half of the customers are willing to pay more for a personalized experience. Retailers can use clienteling apps to help employees understand customer preferences and purchasing history, and provide personalized recommendations based on individual needs. These apps can also include features such as product lookup to provide customers with accurate information about product availability, stock arrival, usage instructions, size variations, colors, warranty, and so on.
AI-powered chatbots are typically used for online customers, but they can also be integrated into employee apps. They can enable a GenAI engine to retrieve all the necessary information about a product, including its availability and location, with a simple prompt. By streamlining the service process, employees can focus more on value-added tasks.
The employee experience framework for retail
To assess their approach, retailers can use the employee experience framework, which defines four stages of capabilities: essential, engage, enable, and empower.
The essential stage focuses on establishing the foundational elements, the engage stage is about fostering collaboration, the enable stage focuses on equipping employees with tools, and finally, the empower stage drives innovation and fosters a culture of employee advocacy.
The framework (see Figure 1) provides a non-exhaustive view for evaluating the maturity of the retailer's approach on the four pillars mentioned above.
Figure 1
Framework to assess approach to employee experience
Figure 1
Ultimately, the integration of technology for enhancing employee experience will foster a cycle of improvement that can elevate the entire retail operation, ensuring sustained success and a competitive edge for retailers. As technology continues to evolve, retailers can find more ways to harness its potential in creating an efficient, responsive, and rewarding environment for employees, which, in turn, will translate into an enhanced customer experience.
