CA50 Gives Store Associates Tools To Increase Productivity And Enhance Customer Service

In today's retail environment, consumers have many shopping options — from a wide variety of brick and mortar stores such as super-centers, specialty stores, value chains and department stores to a world of online options where customers can locate specific products in just a few clicks. In this highly competitive environment, customer service becomes a critical competitive differentiator — the better the overall in-store experience, the higher the customer retention rate, contributing to higher sales levels. But at the same time retailers need to improve customer service levels, they must also trim operating and labor costs in order to support the every day value price savvy customers have come to expect. In essence, today's retailer needs to do more with less.

Personal interactions with store associates have a significant impact on customer loyalty and a retailer's bottom line. A slow or unhelpful response to customer questions regarding merchandise — pricing, location, availability and more — can quickly lead to customer frustration, a lost sale, lost future sales and bad word of mouth. Retailers need to find solutions that enable all store associates, with varying skill, experience and dedication levels, to provide a higher level of customer service, even when staff levels are light.

Retail managers have been hampered with ineffective methods of managing highly mobile store associates who are constantly moving throughout the store. To delegate a single task, a manager needs to walk the sales floor to locate employees who could be anywhere in the retail environment — on the sales floor, at the register or in the back room. As a result of this inefficient process, employee idle time is high, and critical tasks — like processing incoming shipments of seasonal merchandise or re-stocking promotional items — take longer to be completed.