How Can Software Help Retailers Achieve and Maintain Best Practices?

No matter where you go, retailers of all sizes recognize the need to perform well: competition is fierce, and one bad customer experience can erase years of loyalty. As a result, retailers – often working with partners like Logile – strive to identify “best practices” that they can teach to their employees.

But once these best practices are identified and taught, how can they be maintained? Many retailers limit themselves to paper records, which often fail because of lack of visibility throughout the organization. The ubiquitous cleanliness checks found on the backs of restroom doors are prime examples. More often than not they are incomplete or outdated, not because of corporate indifference, but as a result of the effort required to maintain accountability from a corporate level.

Thankfully, retailers now have more options. Task Execution and Compliance software solutions, like Logile’s EC5™, can play a major role in establishing and maintaining best practices throughout an organization. Here are just a few ways that it helps:

Best practices can be easily documented and organized

Once best practices have been identified, they can be documented and organized in the solution’s library. From there, training tasks can be easily distributed to establish and reinforce the desired step-by-step procedures, and checklist tasks can be assigned to region- and corporate-level reviewers to ensure that conditions and standards are being met.

Logile’s EC5™ includes many industry-typical templates covering a wide variety of best practices, providing a helpful starting point and making it easy to adapt the tool for each retailer’s specific needs.

Top-to-bottom visibility and alerting

Unlike paper logs, which typically require a personal visit to the store in order to gain any visibility, the results of tasks assigned using EC5™are immediately available to the right audience. Corporate stakeholders in each department or functional area can be given access to the results relevant to them, for review and appropriate follow-up. Day-to-day accountability thus becomes an attainable goal, which would otherwise be virtually impossible.

Results can also be shared in real time with store and department managers, so that they remain aware of compliance in their respective areas. And a variety of reporting options make it possible for these users to receive custom, high-level reports on a regular basis, automatically, so that they can quickly see how their areas are meeting key compliance metrics.

Sometimes passive visibility isn’t enough, however. EC5™’s alerting options make it possible to send notifications when certain conditions are met. By enabling these, corporate and store users receive notification of specific out-of-compliance conditions in real time, on the device(s) of their choice.

In summary, remember that best practices need to not only be identified, but also established and especially maintained, in order to fully realize their benefit. Software like EC5™ can make that possible.