How Your Customers Benefit from Next-Gen Workforce Management

When we think about retail workforce management (WFM), we typically think about how it makes your retail organization more efficient. WFM helps you optimize store labor schedules, reduce employee turnover, and ensure your store associates stay engaged during their shifts. But these benefits also contribute to one important retail goal: improving the customer experience.

In today’s customer-centric age, it’s critical to understand how all new strategies, technologies, and ideas impact the customer. When initiatives to optimize the customer experience are put into place, they invariably impact sales and profit as well. A customer having a good retail experience is a customer buying more from your stores. Implementing Next-Gen Workforce Management, or WFM with advanced capabilities that address the broader scope of work in stores, can improve the interactions your customers have with associates, as well as their shopping experience in your stores.

Great Interactions with Helpful Store Associates

Every strategy you use that positively impacts your store associates will also positively impact the customer experience. Next-Gen WFM offers advanced forecasting to ensure store associates’ schedules are optimized for real-time store workload and traffic, as well as mobile employee self-service capabilities for associates to mold their schedules around their other obligations. Next-Gen WFM also automates scheduling for store managers so they have more time to coach associates. As a result, store associates are more engaged and less likely to leave their jobs.

What does this do for your customers? Store associates who have been working for a retail organization for years rather than months or weeks have far more experience and are far more knowledgeable, making it easier for them to give customers the information they’re looking for. They’re also happier, more engaged, and more positive when interacting with customers and working to meet their needs.

Pleasant, helpful store associates are essential to crafting an excellent customer experience. By providing them with schedules that work for them and giving them the tools to make changes as needed, you’re setting them up for successful interactions with your customers.

Transformative Experiences with Experiential Retail

The way a store looks and feels is incredibly important to today’s customer. No customer is impressed by a store that is untidy or dirty, or by a store that offers innovative omnichannel services but doesn’t execute them effectively. In fact, as many retailers make experiential retail a major priority, customers have come to expect in-store experiences that go beyond the basics to dazzle and excite them.

Next-Gen Retail Workforce Management can help retailers provide customers with these experiences. By ensuring that labor schedules account for customer traffic and store workload, Next-Gen WFM guarantees that enough store associates are scheduled to both attend to customers’ immediate needs and ensure a pleasant experience as they navigate the store. When store associates aren’t overburdened with work because of scheduling inconsistencies, they have more time to complete tasks that are critical to the customer experience, such as stocking shelves, BOPIS fulfillment, and locating products for customers, as well as executing the displays and promotions necessary for next-level experiential retail. They’re not too stressed from their workload to interact with customers and provide the personalized experience that is expected today.

With customers expecting retailers today to commit to experiential retail strategies that are unique and exciting, ensuring that your store associates can enable those strategies is essential to remaining competitive in today’s retail environment.

To learn more about what Next-Gen WFM can do for your retail organization, read our white paper, “Make Next-Gen Retail Workforce Management Work for You.”