Achieving Retail Excellence, which involves providing a unique experience to each customer, requires internal operational excellence. This involves improving information exchange between in-store and headquarters teams. How can you provide an unforgettable customer experience if the merchandising is not in place or if there is a lack of lighting? It’s also necessary for the sales teams to be completely dedicated to the customer. How can we provide attentive service to the customer if we don’t know their profile, needs, and flagship products? How can we sell products if we’re not regularly trained on their specifics and sales techniques?

All these points require perfect coordination between the headquarters and the retail locations. Retail excellence, therefore, also relies on operational excellence. Hence, there’s a need to consider implementing tools for better responsiveness and productivity within teams. But it’s not just that. These tools should also facilitate decision-making by aggregating all data, in addition to on-site information. It’s crucial that these tools seamlessly fit into your internal organization and business processes. All these concerns shouldn’t be exclusive to the CIO and the manager.

Behind these ambitious resolutions that may seem unattainable for some teams, concrete actions, however, make operational excellence achievable. Here is a presentation of actions to implement within your company to align your teams towards operational excellence.

Information exchange at the heart of operational excellence in Retail.

WhatsApp, emails, SMS—often, your teams use numerous communication channels. Sales tracking, merchandising implementation, commercial operations launch, training, store equipment maintenance—many pieces of information pass through a handful of people even though they have a real impact on the entire organization. If all this data could be centralized, structured, standardized, and compiled, your teams would gain efficiency. Firstly, managers at headquarters would no longer have to search and re-enter information to compile it into an Excel file or a PowerPoint presentation. Secondly, on-site teams would also gain productivity by using a common tool that, with a few clicks, would instantly relay information to the right people. Finally, the leadership would have at a glance dashboards to analyze data and cross-reference numerous sources that don’t communicate with each other.

Considering all these elements, operational excellence in retail inevitably requires streamlining exchanges between on-site teams, managers, and leadership. Moreover, all this information must be standardized and compiled to make it usable in decision-making tools.

Operational Excellence Serving In-Store Customer Experience.

To offer your customers a unique experience, your employees must be able to provide exceptional service quality. Here again, you need to align your teams towards operational excellence, which involves:

• Training: Training your sales force on products and sales methods requires regular monitoring and evaluations. You will need a tool to push content to your teams but also to assess their skills and progress. And the ultimate goal would be to evaluate the impact of training on sales or customer satisfaction! Once again, this implies collecting and cross-referencing data from different sources.
• Store maintenance: It’s impossible to offer a unique customer experience if there are missing lights or damaged furniture. To quickly repair or replace what needs to be fixed, your store managers must be able to easily alert the relevant services or providers, who must also react quickly and inform about intervention or repair deadlines. Store teams should be able to focus on sales and customer reception rather than managing breakdowns!
• Customer knowledge: Customers increasingly expect personalized services and advice. Unfortunately, customer data is not always accessible to sales teams in-store. Yet, if your salespeople could access their customers’ latest purchases, obtain information about their needs and behaviors, it would allow them to offer significantly superior service quality.

Operational Excellence, a Growth Engine.

Aligning your retail teams towards operational excellence also ensures an increase in turnover while gaining productivity.

Boost your teams to achieve turnover goals: everyone must have visibility on their goals and results. Your in-store teams should be able to track the evolution of their sales. An additional source of motivation: let them know daily what bonuses they will receive at the end of the month!

Boost your sales with impeccable merchandising: If the headquarters must inform store managers about new merchandising and planograms to implement, these managers must be able to report to headquarters the proper reception of equipment, their implementation in accordance with expectations, etc. If everyone has the right information at the right time, they will gain responsiveness and can fully focus on sales.

Boost your performance with decision support tools: Your managers and the management must be able to analyze the data coming from the field in real-time. Implement clear analysis tables that cross multiple sources to help them make the right decisions for your business at the right time.

Digitize your decision-making processes.

Achieving operational excellence within your teams necessarily requires the collection and judicious use of a certain volume of data. At this level, the multitude of communication channels coupled with a myriad of supports is no longer sufficient to obtain a clear visibility of these various data.

Information feedback must be carried out more and more quickly to provide answers and solutions in the shortest possible time to guarantee customer satisfaction. Moreover, this data must be presented clearly according to its nature and content.

With the Daxium-Air platform, teams in the field as well as managers and the Direction can aim for operational excellence by focusing on reactivity in information sharing as well as on data standardization to make them exploitable.

Furthermore, Daxium-Air is a web & mobile platform. Your in-store teams receive all the information on their tablets (or smartphones) and upload all field data in a few clicks. Headquarters employees have access to data and dashboards on their computers.

Daxium-Air connects to all your existing IT tools: ERP, CRM, HRIS, WMS… You have a single platform to compile and analyze all the data from your company.

Far from complex solutions where interface customization rhymes with coding, Daxium-Air is a no-code solution that evolves easily and quickly according to your organization and needs.