The explosion of e-commerce and omni-channel shopping, set against a backdrop of shop closures and deserted town centres, may point towards the demise of traditional bricks and mortar retailing, however the reality is that their role is simply changing. Retail stores continue to play an important role in the shopping process, but instead of them representing purchasing outlets, they're becoming part of a broader and more complex buying “experience.”
To keep pace with this change, retailers must reinvent their brick-and-mortar outlets to deliver a customer experience that complements their online and call centre channels. The customer who walks into a shop is more likely to be equipped with brand expectations and product knowledge, and staff have to be prepared to extend their buying experience.
A cornerstone of this strategy is finding the right staff for the job, deploying them appropriately, developing them, and rewarding them for their performance. By taking a more holistic approach to optimising their workforce, retailers create long-term, happy employees -and happy employees help create happy shoppers.
A Seismic Shift in Shopping
As recently as five years ago, if you wanted to buy something, chances are you went to a shop. Maybe you did some product research online, but when it was time to buy, your purchase most likely involved interaction with a human being.
Now, that scenario is changing rapidly. Studies, financial reporting, and anecdotal evidence all point to one fact: retail today is vastly different than it was five years ago or even twelve months ago. The rate and extent of change is dramatic and likely to continue, driven by inevitable developments in consumer technologies, increased blurring of global boundaries, and other macro-economic dynamics.
The move from retail shops to online shopping is just growing stronger. Forrester Research predicts that 60% percent of retail sales will involve the web by 2017—either as direct e-commerce transactions or as part of a shopper’s research on a laptop or mobile device.
In the face of all these challenges, brick and mortar stores must use a variety of strategies, both old and new, to remain a part of the retail customer experience puzzle.
Employees as Brand Ambassadors
Clearly, factors like number of stores, location, size, and product mix are critical. In many ways, however, these are the easier parts of creating a brand experience. Retailers can analyse economic forecasts, census data, sales reports and trend data to figure out how to tackle most of these questions.
The big challenge often comes with what has traditionally been thought of as the “softer side” of retail —people. Studies show that customers who interact with engaging staff - those who are polite, knowledgeable and listen to customer concerns in order to provide highly relevant interactions —are more likely to have a “wow” shopping experience that makes them loyal to a brand or store.
Creating this kind of brand experience requires outfitting stores with highly skilled people who embody the brand, love the products, and know those products inside and out. But in an industry where good help is hard to find—and even harder to keep—doing so is far from simple.
Getting the Right Person into the Right Job
An emerging HR strategy called “talent science” can help retailers find employees who are most likely to deliver on their sales goals and their customer engagement objectives. With talent science, retailers can move beyond “gut feel” into the realm of science and technology to hire stronger employees who will embody the brand, succeed at their jobs, and stay and grow with the company. This approach leverages behavioural and performance data to evaluate job candidates based on their compatibility with an organisation and likeliness to drive real business outcomes, helping retailers to improve the quality of their employees.
Talent science software starts by identifying what works with the retailer’s brand and culture, and factors in the specific way the retailer wants to approach customers. It captures the behavioural, cognitive, and cultural traits that best predict success within a retailer’s specific business—such as empathy, attention to detail, and pace—and connects behavioural data with the most important and strategic job-related key performance indicators (KPIs).
The behavioural and performance data is combined to generate an ideal profile for a specific position. This profile provides a consistent structure and a common language for evaluating people. In essence, it helps retailers ensure that they’re hiring people with the job experience as well as the qualities needed to be successful.
This approach has a record of success in the retail and fashion industries because the natural progression from making better hires is the improved ability of those hires to drive sales. This process is able to help organisations increase sales per hour, have higher customer satisfaction surveys and mystery shopper scores and decrease turnover.
To be successful, retailers need to hire and nurture people who not only drive their sales metrics, but also their customer engagement goals. That represents a shift in attitude for retail employees and retailers, alike.
By Jason Taylor, Ph.D., group vice president of development and chief HCM scientist at Infor.
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