The retail sector is the UK’s largest private sector with approximately 287,000 outlets and over 3.6m employees making it easily the nation’s biggest employer. With sales of £321 billion last year, a staggering £175 billion of this came from Grocery retailing. Organising, scheduling and communicating with staff to produce numbers like these makes retail one of the most challenging industries to work in. Add in the increasing demands of the modern customer and arguably, this becomes the ultimate ‘people business’ too.
RMS provide real-time store execution and workforce management solutions designed by retailers to manage the people and activities involved in delivering class leading customer service. From scheduling staff, assigning tasks, communicating information, imparting knowledge to printing and executing promotional campaigns, RMS are the only solution provider to deliver this end-to-end from a modular, easy to use web-based platform.
RMS’s ‘Any-channel’ Communications module enables retailers to deliver targeted, measured and personalised messages eliminating out of control email. Inbuilt rules, knowledge and compliance routines ensure that messages, whether written or verbal, are received by the right people at the right time and contain the necessary information to undertake the task – naturally it also includes a full audit trail so that tasks can be recorded as complete and indexed for future reference or analysis. Nominated for ‘Technology Project of the Year’ at 2014’s Retail Technology Awards, Steve Shepherd, Head of Operations and Customer Support at toy retailer ‘The Entertainer’ had this to say about their experience.
“We have all been very excited about the capabilities that RMS provide us. The new integrated voice capability is very exciting and provides us with a significant ROI and capability. As a rapidly expanding business, having a solution that can be changed and configured by us to meet our changing business needs and structure is essential. RMS enables us to easily measure our operational Comms effectiveness with respect to reach and compliance”.
Within the Grocery trade there is added complexity of constantly evolving legislation, especially in relation to due diligence, food safety, labelling, dates and age restriction as well as the general day-to-day activities that require careful planning and communication. Regardless of what kind of retailer, RMS software helps with these challenges.
Embracing the challenge of staff scheduling is RMS’s People module. Easy to use and simple to implement it delivers a rapid ROI giving the user the tools to understand and overcome the challenges that every retailer faces where scheduling is concerned. Seasonal recruitment becomes a breeze when you know where to recruit, what times of day, how many people you need and how many base hours you already have. The People module has the capability to allow both base and seasonal planning to ensure the customer experience delivered through the schedule is the best it can be.
RMS enable retailers of all types to execute their customer engagement strategy flawlessly and uncover profit. Their modular platform consists of real-time in-store execution, task management, KPI compliance, time and attendance, and labour scheduling; enabling retailers to align store labour with activities to meet corporate goals whilst promoting best-practice responses to real-time metrics and alerts.
Successful Grocery retailing is about promoting service, quality and value and this is exactly what the Booker Food Barn store near Southampton has been doing with major success. RMS’s Print Controller module has been automating their promotional shelf edge ticketing for the past 18 months, replacing much of their traditional Point-of-Sale material with smart impactful tickets that sell. The tickets RMS produce are full colour, include a rich product description along with clear offer information and a photo of the product for easy customer identification – as a result, Food Barn are enjoying +6% YOY sales in addition to saving significant costs associated with traditional POS production including the necessary plastic holders which regularly go missing.
Print Controller is simple to use allowing retailers to design and create impactful and engaging in-store Ticketing and POS that can also include price match information and product ratings courtesy of a strategic relationship between Brand View and RMS. This relationship enables retailers to offer more transparency around their competitive price position offered to shoppers. If shoppers can understand at the point of purchase that they can confidently purchase an item at the same price as other stores, conversion rates soar. RMS modules allow retailers to plan staffing levels to execute campaigns with confidence and enable management to know how promotions are performing at a granular level.
RMS are industry leading trusted advisors in the retail marketplace. For over a decade, more than 70 of the best-known UK retailers have reported dramatic improvements in compliance; higher productivity of employees; and increased revenue and profitability after implementing software from RMS.
Tel: 02380 816000
Email: contact@retail-manager.com
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