What superpower do you want your employees to have?
Imagine and experience where:
- Employees can use tools that empower productivity that allow them to respond quickly to customer requests … do we have that size, what has that customer bought before, what is on offer today?
- Employees can complete training activities on any device anywhere in the Store
- Store Managers can easily track the health of the Store using tools accessible on any device
- Innovative ideas can be captured from across the entire company … success can be attributed to the original idea … and the right people and teams can be recognised and rewarded
Employee Superpowers is about connecting and empowering the retail associates to give them a voice, feel more engagement and create a direct dialog whilst all the time ensuring they are focused on delivering the best customer experience they can. This enables the CEO to reach every single person in the organization and recognize and praise employees along with share best practices at the same time as giving the associate the satisfaction of a customer who will come back … simply because of the experience they have just received.
To date employees have largely been held at bay from a technology perspective and have not had access to information to help then better serve the shopper or complete tasks in the most efficient way. While some companies have progressed all the way to a scenario where they’re using social to engage and connect with all employees, many are somewhere on the spectrum. Often they will digitize an existing paper based process – such as emailing a document vs. printing – but this goes to a shared Store ID vs. an individual. While this has efficiencies it doesn’t really enable two-way dialog and may add concerns around compliance or accountability as employees take turns with a shared login.
In many cases where these employees don’t have a solution provided by corporate IT they have found their own solution. In many cases users bring their own Apps to work such as WhatsApp, Facebook (private groups), Twitter (private feeds). Whilst its always great that users have embraced consumer technology and using it to solve the needs of the store it doesn’t allow them to connect into the organization as a whole or necessarily address the immediate needs of the customer who is standing in front of them.
Mobility, analytics and machine learning are all terms that if you plug them in to your favourite search engine will give you a few billion hits. The point is that, as with the customer experience, employees are expecting more from employers and coming in to work in an environment that has more manual technology than they have at home is not the way to attract and retain the best talent. Using the platforms, they are already using outside of work but layering on the power that an Enterprise can bring in terms of integrated software, customer data analytics and devices not only presents a productive and efficient service to the customer, but also encourages the employee to engage and improve the organisation as whole.
By reducing the manual effort and time involved in completing the everyday tasks assigned to employees they will complete tasks quicker and more efficiently. Giving them the tools and devices necessary to achieve them will allow them to feel trusted and part of the overall success of the Store and Company as a whole.
Next Steps
To realise the value of your data contact Microsoft Services msukservices@microsoft.com.
Join us in our next post where we share our views on how to create insight from the noise of ‘big data’ and optimise the health of your stores.
