Today’s Overview

How a retail business can automate manual and repetitve tasks?🤖🌐

How to streamline and improve inventory management?📊📦

How to improve customer experience?📣🤝

In today’s environment retailers need more than ever to adapt to the market changes and disruptions. The pandemic completely disrupted the supply chains and many retailers had to suffer. Some of them adapted some of them still in the process of doing so but the thing is that still many retailers operate in an old fashioned way with lots of operational challenges, manual work processes and some old legacy systems that already don’t meet the needs of the business. 🛍️💻

Here are some challenges retailers currently face and steps to be taken to solve them. 🤯

Challenge 1

😫 Manual and repetitive tasks

In many retailers employees still deal with manual tasks and sometimes even paperwork when comes to in-store audits, managing stocks, tracking in-store operations and order processing. When market or store employees are tied up with manual and tedious tasks, it affects their productivity and also negatively affecting the customer service because they don’t have time to focus on improving it. These manual retail operations will easily lead to errors such as incorrect data entry, wasting time and workforce.

🚀 Solution

Implement a back office tool that will help streamline operations, improve communication between in-store employees and leadership team, automate manual tasks like data inputting and real time access to important information.

1. Start first with a discovery process and see how operations work in a store. Talk to employees and see how are they performing their tasks everyday, how do they make decisions, how they track inventory and how they process orders. 🔍

2. Map down all the processes and how operations work in a store. If you own multiple stores do the same for others and map down the processes for each store and compare the findings, you might be surprised but you may find out about things or challenges you didn’t even know they happen. ⚙️

3. You can map the processes in the form of a mind-map, it helps organise the info very well and put emphasis on certain steps that you want. In this case the mind map will offer a very detailed overview of the operations and each step employees need to do to perform a task or make a decision. 📝

4. After you refined your mind map start looking for those bottlenecks and challenges at different steps of the operations. Write them bellow the mind map and here you can also create a rating for each problem or challenge ranking it from low to high, high meaning it’s a serious problem that affects a whole tone of processes, operations and is the reason why for example costs are high in that specific area of the business. 🎯

5. Now with all this information you can start thinking and scoping down the back office tool you need to implement for your retail store with all necessary features to solve those specific problems, automate tasks and cut costs and improve employee productivity while executing their daily tasks. 📋

6. Write down all the features based on the processes you have and the challenges you identified, during this process work together with your employees and make them part of the process. In the end you build your solution for them, to make them more productive, achieve their goals and ultimately deliver a great customer experience. 💬

7. Only after you mapped down everything and scoped how the solution needs to work you can start developing and implementing it. Another route is to see based on your requirements, scope and processes if there is a SaaS solution that can fit all your needs. ✅

8. If what you scoped down and mapped looks like a big software to develop and implement go for iterative process, develop and implement it in versions. Start with the most important features and problems you need to solve and deploy the first version of the solution while working on developing the other features and sections. This way you start testing the solution early on and implement the changes where necessary. ♟️

Challenge 2

😰 Inventory and warehousing management

If warehouses and inventory are poorly managed it can create serious pain points for the business. For retailers it’s very important to always have the right amount of stock available and not overstock or not being able to meet the demand from the customers.  

If your inventories aren’t synced properly, your team and your customers may not have access to important information about your products. Financial records, sales data, forecasting, and reporting will also be compromised, leaving you without the data you need to budget and plan for the future, Especially when planning marketing campaigns and fulfilling your inventory.

All this can lead to:

• Lost orders. 🆘

• Inaccurate inventory counts.❌

• Inaccurate or duplicated barcodes and stock keeping unit (SKU) numbers. 💥

• Slow order fulfillment. ⌛️

• Shipping errors.🚨

• Inaccurate or incomplete returns.⭕️

• No connection between purchase orders, shipping documents, and invoices sent 🧮

• High storage costs and less space for more successful products due to excess inventory.💸

🚀 Solution

In the back office tool we discussed earlier implement also a section for inventory and warehousing management. Allow your suppliers to collaborate with you here, set up automated orders and automated notifications for inventory level. This way you will always have an optimised level of inventory and suppliers will get notified automatically when you placed an order with all required details. 🧠🚀

Real-time visibility into inventory operations and centralised place for all the data results in very solid reports on different data points you want to analyse which will help you better manage your supply chain, costs, marketing and sales. 📊📈

Challenge 3

Poor customer service 🙁

For retailers customer service is one of key instruments in making their customers happy and growing retention. Unfortunately when the team doesn’t have access to all the data and instruments to be able to offer great customer experience or service ends up in lost opportunities. Especially if it’s difficult to for your team to find out detailed info about the order of a specific customer than it makes it even more difficult for them to answer customers’ questions, track orders and manage various late deliveries or mistakes in orders accordingly. 📣

🚀 Solution

When implementing the back-office tool for your retails business together with all necessary features including automated inventory management make sure to also offer a multi channel environment for your people to have access to all the required info they need to be able to support customers with their requests, quickly answer their questions (people like speed) and solve their issues in a quick manner. Also make sure you have here all your rules and company policies in regards to customer support, make it easy accessible with intuitive user interfaces and divide them by categories for easier navigation. Make sure to also implement the feature where you and the team will be able to track at what stage is each customer support request and who needs to handle what, this way you will be able to improve workflows and processes regarding customer support which will ultimately lead to happier customers, seamless experience and increased sales. 🌟📞🤝💵

Isn’t it time to have a better overview on your retail business? Implementing these solutions will substantially increase your sales, productivity of your team and reduce operational costs. Cheers to your success! 🎉

Thank you for reading the newsletter! We are always open to feedback and new ideas or ways to improve the content for you to get the most out of it and have a positive impact on you. You can always reply to this email with your thoughts or feedback.

****To make sure you receive all further insights and articles, reply to this message or mark it as not spam. Thank you for reading us!

Follow us on https://twitter.com/Notifiqation_ 👌