Retail Restart Realities – Safety at All Touchpoints

As retailers begin the process of reopening stores, a measured approach is needed to review all business practices and ensure they are in line with today’s needs. Health and safety are at the forefront of this process to comply with various guidelines, recommendations, and regulations. Customers and employees alike need to feel that appropriate steps are being taken to protect them, before they’ll be comfortable returning to the store.

Prioritize Associate Well-Being

Many people are focused on the problem of managing the customer experience during the recovery period, with discussions of how to implement shopping by appointment and pickup services. This is obviously an important challenge, but the employee experience is also vital.

If your store teams don’t feel safe at work, they may call out or even quit rather than risk their health. These unplanned, avoidable absences could cause scheduling gaps that are hard to fill during the recovery process. Not only could scheduling gaps disrupt customer service efforts, but if any associates do get sick, it could delay or derail the reopening process.

Identify and Eliminate Hot Spots

Some of the necessary changes are fairly intuitive—supplying associates with PPE, increasing cleaning and sanitization, limiting occupancy in the store; all of these initiatives are key for customer and employee safety. However, some of the employee-facing measures—for example, rearranging the break room to enable social distancing—may be less obvious.

One of these employee-facing hot spots is your time clocks. In order to clock in and out for each shift and break, every associate swipes their time card or badge or manually types in an ID number. Even with increased sanitization, physical time clocks are a high-contact surface that all of your store employees must interact with—making it a high-risk point for transmission.

Implement Touchless Clocking

Reducing the amount of direct contact associates have with time clocks reduces that risk of infection. Tablet clocks enabled with facial recognition and voice control can offer totally touchless clocking.

Instead of interacting with a physical time clock, associates can clock in and out securely with facial recognition or with a QR code scanned from their personal mobile device, as well as navigate all clock functions using voice commands. Similarly, geofenced, mobile access to employee self-service applications allows associates to clock in and out from their personal device, without needing to come into contact with physical time clocks.

Touchless tablet clocks with facial recognition could help avoid the transmission of germs in your retail locations and improve safety and hygiene for your associates. To learn more about enabling secure, clean biometric clocking, discover Reflexis Time and Attendance or email sales@reflexisinc.com.