4 Ways Technology Helps Retailers Thrive in The Modern Marketplace

Introduction

If you own or operate a retail store, you know that today’s shoppers take advantage of technology in order to find the best shopping experiences and prices.

Every customer who walks in seems like an expert with a pocketful of coupons. They’ve done their research and downloaded their discounts ahead of time. Then, after pulling out their smartphones, they start scanning barcodes. Finally, when they find a cheaper price online somewhere, they demand that you make a deal and match that price, or they’ll take their business elsewhere.

It often feels like consumers are now in control. With just their smartphones and a few minutes, they can find the best prices, the best products, and the best services.

However, that’s not much truer today than it’s ever been. Shoppers have always had the upper hand because they’ve always had the option to walk out the door.

To succeed now, retailers need to change strategies and “fight fire with fire.” That is, they must use technology themselves to meet customers’ demands: discounts, deals, convenience, and an “experience.”

Technology, Now Essential

This means that technology is no longer an amenity — it’s a core part of your business and essential to turning those smartphone-wielding shoppers into customers and gaining an edge on your competitors.

Retailers need to use technology to meet customers’ demands: discounts, deals, convenience, and an “experience.” 

There’s a lot of money at stake here

According to a recent study by Cisco, implementing technologies like mobile-enabled shopping, interactive signage, and improved delivery systems could lead to a 15.6 percent improvement in profitability for a large, national retailer. 

Whether you’re a national or regional chain or a mom-and-pop store, these sorts of gains are attainable for any size retailer.

Of course, operating a retail store involves more than customer engagement. You have to move inventory, forecast trends, and document sales histories. You also have to make sure the HVAC system functions properly and the bathrooms are clean. And especially since the advent of e-commerce and then the Great Recession, you know that efficiency is king in your marketplace.

Technology, including mobile apps and point-of-sale (POS) software, is the way to solve many of these challenges. Yet knowing where to start — and what tools to choose from the burgeoning tech marketplace — isn’t easy.

To help, this eBook walks you through four ways to use technology to improve your store’s operations, your efficiency, and, ultimately, your bottom line.

You’ll find practical solutions for using technology to achieve these essential goals of modern retailers: 

• Prepare for and pass inspections 
• Fulfill orders and deliveries 
• Manage and motivate employees
• Engage customers

Chapter 1: Prepare For And Pass Inspections

For a long time, small retailers operated largely off the radar of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). After all, most small retailers don’t have many hazardous materials or heavy equipment on hand. Moreover, they don’t perform dangerous activities, like welding, on-site.

That began to change as recently as 2010 when OSHA and other regulators came to realize the sheer number of people who work in retail operations — nearly 10 percent of the U.S. workforce — and the devastating consequences of unsafe working conditions. In 2010, two years after a worker was trampled to death by a mob of shoppers during a Black Friday sales event, the Department of Labor launched a campaign focused on improving crowd management in major retail stores. This was followed by regulations to protect late-night retail workers from workplace violence, and most recently, in 2015, the tightening of occupational injury recordkeeping and reporting requirements for retailers in a number of areas, from automotive dealers to specialty food stores. 

Today’s retailers are evaluated on everything. 

Federal, state, county, and municipal inspectors inspect retail operations for illness and injury prevention plans and emergency evacuation plans. They also seek to make sure your establishment is in line with regard to policies on fire prevention, ergonomics, electrical safety, ladder use, corridor and walkway accessibility, and sexual harassment. And that’s just a start.

Today’s retailers are evaluated on everything from whether exits are properly marked, illuminated, and unobstructed, to how employees handle food and hazardous chemicals, whether floors are free of hazards, and whether proper signage is displayed when floors are wet.

How can technology help? What technologies work best?

Simple but Smart Solutions

Technology has a reputation for being costly, time consuming, and complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. Considering that your employees likely have varied tech experience, the last thing you want is to give them something they can’t use. That’s why simple solutions like mobile apps, which the majority of employees use on their own, work best.

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets put information at your employees’ fingertips — including the many safety regulations they need to track and enforce in your store, but might not always remember in the rush of the job. By equipping your managers and employees with something as simple as a mobile safety checklist, you can lower your risk of an essential safety measure slipping through the cracks — and leading to a costly lawsuit or even workers’ compensation claim.

Why checklists? Again, the goal is to keep it simple, and there’s really nothing complicated about a checklist.

Checklists can help you systematically ensure that your safety procedures are clear, effective, and easy for your employees to access and follow. OSHA offers dozens of safety plans from which you can build your own checklists.

But OSHA’s plans are paper-based, and new and increasing regulations make it difficult to get by with paper filing, which requires a staff person to manually key in information from the forms to a computer. In addition, when OSHA inspectors show up at stores, they typically want documentation on the spot — so there’s no time to sift through paper documents. A better option is to turn your paper forms into digital, mobile versions. Software programs (like the one we offer at Canvas) make it fast and easy to create mobile apps, which means you don’t have to know how to code.

Benefits of Mobile 

With mobile safety apps, your data is always available, so store managers can see what safety measures are accounted for, and what still needs to be done. All in all, you’ll speed up and simplify the compliance process, while increasing the accountability of your staff.

With mobile safety apps, your data is always available, so store managers can see what safety measures are accounted for, and what still needs to be done.

It’s a bit like having a whole suite of OSHA safety posters on your tablet or phone, except in this case, the posters are interactive and updatable — and your 21st-century employees are much more likely to use them.

Consider the many ways mobile checklists can improve how you manage safety in your workplace:

• Completing store and merchandising inspections
• Identifying risks and alerting folks of them immediately
• Creating emergency plans 
• Labeling hazardous materials 
• Maintaining equipment 
• Training new employees
• Preparing for OSHA and local government inspections

Using mobile checklists to manage your safety program can speed up your response time in significant ways. For instance, something as simple as a torn rug can be reported as soon as it’s noticed, with an alert sent straight to your maintenance team. The expedited response time, in this and other cases, can do a lot to prevent unnecessary trips, falls, and injuries. In addition, you’ll have a documented trail to see precisely what happened, when, and how your staff responded.

Meet Core Goals and Objectives 

With store inspections, mobile checklists make the process more efficient and effective, while allowing you to meet core objectives and goals. You can use checklists, for instance, for general inspections of your parking lot, restrooms, HVAC, plumbing and electrical systems, water fountains, and so on. Or you can use them for more specific reasons — like making sure your store is “on brand” with your overall look, feel, and marketing and business goals.

Mobile checklists are easy to update and tailor to your company’s unique needs. By doing so, you’re giving your staff the tools and information they need to do their job well.

Using mobile checklists to manage your safety program can speed up your response time in significant ways. In addition, you’ll have a documented trail to see precisely what happened, when, and how your staff responded.

Chapter 2: Fulfill Orders And Deliveries

Keeping your store in top shape is key for the safety of both employees and customers. But unless you can get your merchandise into your customer’s hands when and where they want it, none of that matters.

Delivery and fulfillment are critical in today’s marketplace, with a company like Amazon.com — almost always the low-price leader — continuously upping its game by promising faster delivery, creating membership programs, and even testing drones for same-day delivery.

But wait, you say, you’re a brick-and-mortar storefront.

However, as global competition and e-commerce heat up, even the smallest local shops are pursuing multiple channels for selling their goods. That means you should be doing a lot more at your store than just point-of-sale purchases.

That includes selling items through appropriate online channels such as Etsy, eBay, and Amazon itself. It also means offering customers innovative ways to shop.

Besides operating an e-commerce space on your website, allow customers to buy online and pick up in the store (BOPIS), which turns your store into a small fulfillment center.

Delivery and fulfillment are critical in today’s marketplace.

It’s all about offering your customers both greater convenience and a better price.

However, the purchase orders and deliveries that come with e-commerce and BOPIS involve a lot of moving parts and logistics, especially in today’s global marketplace, where products are purchased and shipped all the time from one country to the next.

Unfulfilled orders, damaged merchandise, and late deliveries can damage your company’s reputation and result in lost customers. And in-store order fulfillment, once as simple as ringing someone up at the cash register, has become as complex as e-commerce with the advent of BOPIS. There are many technologies, including mobile apps and mobile payments, that can help.

New Marketplace, New Solutions

Still, using the old pen- and paper-based forms that have served retailers so well for decades?

You’re missing out on productivity and cost savings. Mobile forms and purchase orders, for instance, can be automatically populated as your employees complete them. With paper forms, someone has to key in information by hand, transferring that info from paper into the computer, costing money and time, and increasing the chance of errors.

Using mobile apps reduces printing, storage, and distribution costs.

Mobile-based forms are faster to complete and are almost always more accurate. And using mobile apps reduces printing, storage, and distribution costs.

Likewise, mobile forms can accompany your employees on the go, whether they’re straying from checkout to help customers on the floor or attending a local, national, or international market or fair. Showing up at these events with paper-based systems will come across as outdated and put you at risk of losing key information. It will also slow down your processing time for orders and deliveries.

As retailers venture beyond their brick-and-mortar stores, and as they need employees who can fulfill multiple roles at once, mobile payments are becoming another must-have in the industry. Just be sure to choose a payment option that integrates fully with your mobile purchase order app. At Canvas, for instance, our retail apps sync with PayPal, which means you can use them on the go to take orders and collect payments — all in a series of fast, simple steps.

Chapter 3: Manage And Motivate Employees

Your employees are a top asset and represent your business to your customers. They’re also the source of a lot of work for managers and operators. From training and scheduling to managing workflow, ensuring competence, and conducting performance evaluations, there’s a lot to stay on top of and track.

Your biggest challenge might be keeping your employees engaged. According to a 2012 study by Dale Carnegie Training, 45 percent of American employees are only partially engaged — and a full 26 percent consider themselves disengaged. The cost of this disengagement? The Dale Carnegie researchers say that the employee turnover rate is approaching 65 percent — and that businesses in the United States lose $11 billion every year due to all of this turnover.

In the retail industry, turnover rates are notoriously high, especially for part-time employees. In 2014, for instance, 66 percent of part-time, hourly retail workers left their positions, compared with 27 percent of full-time workers, a study from the Hay Group found (as discussed in The Wall Street Journal). What’s more, according to a CNBC report, the majority left for voluntary reasons, such as being unsatisfied with their jobs.

What can lower the retail churn? Higher pay rates won’t hurt, but experts say motivation and engagement efforts are key, too.

There are a few tried-and-true methods to motivate employees and make them more productive, including economic incentives, providing meaningful feedback frequently, and training managers properly. 

Motivation and engagement efforts are key to helping lower retail churn.

Technology as a Solution

The right tools and technologies can help you manage and improve things like employee productivity, motivation, and engagement. For example, mobile POS devices serve as mobile catalogs and cash registers that retailers can use to sell products right off the floor. These small devices come with credit card sliders and merchandise scanners. And they allow individual employees to play the combined roles of sales associate, help desk, and cashier — and store owners to get by with fewer employees.

With mobile POS devices, mobile applications used on smartphones or tablets can help with employee management and engagement in a number of ways:

• Mobile recruiting apps allow you to screen potential employees for numerous factors, including engagement and personal fit.
• Management apps give store managers easy access to tips and strategies to improve their skills, helping you avoid one of the biggest drags on employee engagement: bad management.
• Collaboration apps facilitate communication and teamwork among staff members. Employees can use these apps to create, edit, and share files — and to produce and discuss their own ideas for improving productivity.
• GPS mobile apps allow you (or your managers or employees) to track where your employees are in the store and what they’re doing, so you don’t waste time searching aisle after aisle when you need them.

In addition to motivating employees, it can be difficult to know which employees are carrying their weight and which ones aren’t. Apps can help you track labor costs and eliminate paperwork in a few important ways, including: 

• Time cards/sheet tracking 
• Tracking sales and other meetings 
• Producing and hosting training guides and checklists
• Ensuring quality, safety, security, and merchandise inspections

Perhaps the biggest benefits of equipping your team with mobile devices and apps are that your employees will feel armed and empowered with information — and your customers will view your employees as knowledgeable, valuable team members who can answer questions and produce results.

The biggest benefits of equipping your team with mobile devices and apps are that your employees will feel armed and empowered with information — and your customers will view your employees as knowledgeable, valuable team members who can answer questions and produce results.

Chapter 4: Engage Customers

This is Where You “Fight Fire with Fire”

“Customer service” and “customer experience” are no longer enough. Competitive price points aren’t even enough.

In today’s retail world, customer engagement trumps all and is a key to success. According to a 2014 poll by Gallup, in consumer electronics retail, “fully engaged shoppers make 44 percent more visits per year to their preferred retailer than do actively disengaged shoppers.”

While discounts and deals continue to rank highly with shoppers, what most customers want are innovations that make the retail experience more convenient, efficient, and engaging. Ultimately, they want an experience that guides them through and streamlines the process and delivers value at the end.

Customer engagement extends well beyond customer loyalty cards and other discount and refund programs.

How Can You Engage Customers?

Real engagement starts once shoppers enter your establishment. Once there, have an in-store app and your customers will be there waiting. According to a recent survey by Cisco, up to 73 percent of correspondents said they would use a retailer’s app while shopping. These apps serve as a guide to your merchandise, alert shoppers to deals, and help shoppers locate items and pass along online reviews or ingredient lists.

Customers want innovations that make the retail experience more convenient, efficient, and engaging.

The most advanced retail apps function like question-answering robots — but you don’t have to spend that much to start engaging your customers. Here are a few ideas:

• QR codes: Get your customers to scan these codes with their smartphones and send them a product video, image gallery, or special offer.
• Mobile payments: Sixty percent of today’s customers are interested in mobile payments, the Cisco survey found. And you’re already federally mandated to update your POS systems to handle pin-and-chip-based credit cards by October 2015 — and do away with swipe-and-sign credit cards for good. Stay ahead of the curve by taking steps now to equip your POS systems with a mobile payment solution, especially one that integrates with your orders (such as the Canvas mobile apps we discussed earlier, which sync with PayPal).
• Digital receipts: Your customers no longer store receipts in boxes underneath their beds, so why give them something they’re just going to lose or trash? Instead, digital receipts allow you to cut your paper bill, while giving customers a more convenient way to track their purchases. Digital receipts also let you send discounts or rewards right to your customers’ smartphones, where they can immediately post about their purchases on Facebook.
• Beacons: These transmitters, located around your store, can interact with your customers’ smartphones if they’ve installed your in-store app. They alert customers to discounts and awards.
• In-store digital signs: Using beacons and in-store apps, these signs can alert customers to deals tailored to their interests, and then guide them through your store. They also can be used to show estimated wait times at your now “smart” checkout lines. This is an expensive proposition, but 77 percent of shoppers would love to see it happen.

In many ways, the scramble of retailers to implement the right tools and technologies is an “arms race” of sorts, with customers using their phones to find better deals — and you using tech to keep them in your store.

The end goal of these tools is to generate engagement and loyalty by being more responsive to your customer’s needs than ever before.

The Time Is Now

No matter the size or type of store you operate, you’re looking to improve employee productivity, cut costs, and bolster your operations and efficiencies. And technology, especially mobile apps that can help you manage inventory, fulfill sales, and engage customers and employees, is mandatory in reaching those goals.

The most important thing to realize is that technology does not stand still and will continue to evolve as customer preferences, shopping habits, and even employee work habits change.

Use technology to interact with and get to know your customers — and to streamline many other parts of your operations, from the way you meet safety compliance to how you track inventory and fulfill orders and deliveries.

Moving these systems from paper to digital will give you data that you can use to make smarter decisions, run your day-to-day operations more effectively, and even build your store’s brand and increase your profits.

At GoCanvas, we offer hundreds of mobile apps created by and especially for modern retailers. Browse our selection of existing apps, let us convert your paper forms into apps, or create your own apps with our easy-to-use technology.

Ready to Rethink How You Work?

GoCanvas has helped a variety of businesses across multiple industries transform their safety processes and rethink their efficiency, ultimately saving them money. Why not do the same? Reach out to one of our experts today to kickstart your process revolution.