The Best Sensors In Retail Are Your Frontline Staff

Let us let you in on a huge retail industry tip: your frontline workers on the ground are your strongest eyes and ears! 

Encourage them to participate in the reactive reporting of any incidents or suggestions they might have. 

After all, your staff on the ground are actively in the fray. This makes them perfectly positioned to inform suggestions regarding the customer experience, the quality of goods, security, and visual merchandising.

Here, we will explore how to encourage your staff to participate, and why their involvement is important.

How To Keep Your Staff Engaged

To ensure that your staff engages in reactive reporting, you will need the right reporting platform. You want a centralised, easy-to-use platform that your staff can access from any device. Having a platform like this makes it easier for your staff to report and log incidents instantly. That way, you can deal with issues much more efficiently. 

Reactive reporting is essential for gaining insight and feedback regarding business strategy execution. Your frontline workers can report back on a strategy’s strengths and weaknesses in real-time. That way, you can implement and revise your strategy development using a bottom-up approach, rather than a traditional top-down approach. 

Reactive reporting will also mean that you can rectify any small problems faster. You can resolve them before they have the chance to develop into larger, more damaging issues. This speedy resolution of problems will help protect your store’s brand. When small issues are left unresolved, problems can develop and build up until they negatively impact service quality. 

This will ultimately damage your brand’s reputation. Instead, ensure that your brand is synonymous with an effortless customer experience and top-quality goods by encouraging frontline workers to engage in reactive reporting. 

You can also incentivise retail employees to engage with the incident reporting platform. Reward or recognise the reporting of irregularities by staff on the ground to show their input is appreciated. 

Frontline reports will give your retail store valuable insight into key operational performance statistics. You can compare these stats between regional areas and other stores to determine which strategies work best in practice.

Why Is This Important?

Improving communications between your frontline workers and management will equip management with valuable information. This information can be turned into actionable insight to support the growth and development of your business.

Encouraging employees to participate in incident monitoring will help employees feel empowered. They will be actively involved in creating a positive working environment for themselves. 

Retail employees are essential workers who should feel heard and cared for during this pandemic. So, beyond the benefits your store can expect, improvements to the conditions faced by employees on the ground can also be an important benefit.

Final thoughts

In the retail industry, your frontline workers can offer extremely valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your operation.

Empower your frontline employees by encouraging them to participate in incident reporting. 

Are you looking for a tool to improve incident and efficiency management, feedback, as well as other reactive reporting processes in your organisation? Falcony | Observe ticks all the boxes for low-threshold reporting, analytics and follow-up actions. Is easy to customise, enables real dialogue, anonymous reporting, and a lot more.