Overseeing a team of remote retail workers certainly comes with its challenges. It’s hard to know exactly where your budget is having the most impact or which of your employees are performing the best if you’re using slow, outdated retail talent management methods. Implementing talent management tools and one technology platform means that you can transform your talent into a more productive workforce. You need a solution that includes budgeting, scheduling, reporting, time and attendance, and payroll and compliance all in one place. That way, you have one system of record for your entire retail team. Technology will allow you to increase sales, optimize the productivity of your team and improve the ROI of your current talent spend.
What are the Benefits?
1. Reduce admin time for your managers
Any manager will tell you, they spend an exorbitant amount of time buried in admin work. This is valuable time that they could be spending on the sales floor or educating and training their team. Instead, they’re being bogged down by creating manual schedules, updating excel spreadsheets with their budgets, and manually approving timesheets and payroll. These outdated processes cost companies big bucks.
2. Switch to real-time scheduling
If you were able to see your sales performance by store and by door in real-time, you could schedule people where they have the most impact on sales. You wouldn’t need to wait until the end of the month or the end of the quarter. Instead, you could flexibly decide when and where talent is most productive. This real-time insight into scheduling means you can make good business decisions even faster. Online scheduling software can make this a reality for your hourly retail workforce. Right now, you may have an idea about which stores are selling the most and which times of the day see the most sales, but with real-time reporting, you have concrete numbers to budget against.
3. Real-time budgeting
Speaking of real-time, one of the biggest ways that you can impact your sales is to see your real-time budget to actual performance. The budgeting tools that you’re probably using today aren’t actionable or in real-time. When you use a talent management system, the accuracy of your sales reporting is enhanced because it’s done on a shift-by-shift basis. How does this help, exactly? You can act on these numbers and give more hours to top sellers. Anything you can do to get better, faster sales results will help you make better business decisions.
4. Reduce unfilled shifts
For every shift that goes unfilled, that sales lost. By being able to schedule with an on-demand staffing platform and mobile app, you can reduce unfilled shift. If someone calls out at the last minute, no problem, you can schedule a shift and have talent working in the store in no time. Better coverage of shifts means that you won’t lose out on those sales. On-demand scheduling isn’t truly possible with the old methods of calls, texts, and emails. Plus, those are all time consuming and disorganized.
5. Better communication and education
Something that you may not immediately think about when it comes to increasing your retail sales is employee retention and education. High turnover costs companies big time. By keeping your sales associates more engaged with their managers, they have better information and feel more connected to your brand. Giving them better tools to do their jobs better means talent will stay with the company longer and improve how they do their job.
If you’re ready to start using technology to improve your sales at retail, we can show you how! We’re an on-demand talent management solution that has everything you need to schedule, budget, train, and pay your team – all in one place. Create schedules, see real-time budgets, and communicate with talent through our mobile app. Better technology = more sales.
