April FAQ – How Does Technology Help Support Store Teams and Leaders?
One Friday, each month, I dedicate the post to looking at some questions I have heard recently from developing leaders. Sharing those questions and my thoughts about them is a way for me to spread the information to as many leaders and future leaders as possible. If you have a question about leadership, or just a situation you would like some additional insight on, please email me at Effective Retail Leader. Let’s take a look at this week’s question.
How does technology assist store teams and store leaders in running their stores?
This was an interesting question that came up during a recent conversation. Most retailers have several forms of technology for the stores to utilize in doing their jobs. Some of it sits in the background, and others are more overt. How technology helps store teams can be complicated and varied depending on whom you ask and how it is implemented.
For this discussion, I will assume things like basic communication and email are not really the technology people are asking about. In general, I will move away from traditional Point of Sale (POS) systems as well. Technology should be something that does help retail store associates in how they complete their work and service customers. The possibilities should be endless. However, the implementation and awareness of the tools can make the difference between a useful tool and one that gets in the way.
Using technology to communicate, connect with, and educate your team is, in my opinion, the most important way to leverage today’s technology. There are so many options to share information with many people that it should be something everyone has figured out. That is not always the case. Due to the numerous options available, this can become a barrier. The other challenge many retailers face is determining how to allow employees to access this information. With concerns about the security of information and challenges with ‘on the clock’ and ‘off the clock’ activities, it can be difficult to ensure that all employees can readily access the information. More and more companies are realizing that they can securely provide associates with access to different portals and placing general information in these areas that are not required but of interest to the team.
Helping employees to do their job requires cross-functional groups to work together to ensure that the technology enhances performance and productivity. The success of using mobile devices, desktop computers, or other tools requires well-defined business requirements built by people that understand how the work gets done and what is most important to the end-users. The bigger challenge comes from determining that.
Simply asking front-line associates what they need doesn’t always work. Many of them do not know all the possibilities for solutions that could exist. It becomes that much more important for the working team to understand how the work is completed and the desired outcome. I like to reference a quote credited to Henry Ford about asking townspeople what they needed most to get around faster. “I asked people what they needed, and they all said faster horses. No one thought of a motored vehicle to get them where they wanted to go faster.” The best solutions will come from solving the problems people didn’t realize they had until there was a solution for it.
I am a big fan of using technology to help people work at their highest levels. I share tips for using technology on the first Tuesday of each month. But that does not mean there always needs to be a high-tech solution for everything retail employees do. Technology should enhance and make the work easier, more enjoyable, and pave the way for a better experience – for both associates and customers. Over-relying on technology is a real risk that many companies face. And the need to catch up on how to effectively utilize it is an equal challenge.
The implementation of technology needs to feel intuitive to the users and solve the problem they face at the moment. If they are asked to pick a buy online, pickup in store order, the associate needs the correct information at their fingertips to do just that, pick the order quickly and efficiently. Showing a picture of the item(s), providing a location in the store, and providing the customer information are the key data points that are needed for that order. A technology solution that makes that easy will be the right solution for that situation.
The final piece I will offer on this question is that technology needs to support the goals and outcomes a company seeks. It should do what it needs to do when it needs to do it, and stay in the background to provide that support. Retail is still a people-driven business – you do not want your technology getting in between the front-line sales people and the customer.
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