A customer interview. Coffee Molly Coffee Houses
An interview with one of our customers - the owner of a cafe chain, who has been using Shifton online service for quite a long time.
The niche of retail is highly profitable and in demand, yet it has multiple hidden rocks which can lead to low efficiency of retail management. There is no need to fear them as retail management tips by Shifton may help you cope with the challenges on your way to the highest-efficiency retail management workflow.
The first thing to consider for an effective manager in retail is that this business requires from you to manage a diverse range of things and processes daily. Consider it a non-stopping water flow you need to manage. This flow includes overseeing all store employees, delegating multiple tasks to them, managing their completion, and at once, being a part of a team to provide synergy. Sounds a bit fantastic? It’s real when you have informational support and know how to synergize your retail team’s work. Shifton shares the most effective retail staff management tips to help you with that.
A retail manager is someone who manages a retail store, assists with management, or manages a certain department. Since retail stores can vary in size from small businesses with a few hundred feet of storefronts to large warehouses, malls, and supermarkets owned by huge corporations, the duties and tasks of a retail manager can vary. Moreover, they vary also from day to day depending on the current load on a selling point or a department, customer flow, and even seasonality.
Yet most commonly, being a retail manager includes the following retail staff management tasks:
Saying briefly, a retail manager is an employee who is responsible for the overall functionality and effectiveness of a selling point.
We offer you a couple of tips which suit retail managers of any type and at any size of business and provide resultative retail staff management when applied.
Your selling point should work clockwise to bring profit. For this, you need your personnel to start their work timely and work simultaneously. Thus, even for a small grocery store, you need to provide proper retail scheduling. And regular and logical shifts in supermarkets or malls are a real must.
Although scheduling in the retail industry can be a nightmare, the solution is simple and it is embodied in modern retail scheduling software. With it, you do not need to keep in mind huge data massifs or write them in tables on paper to decide on time-off requests, vacations, emergencies, busy times, lazy times, sick times, etc. Instead, you use an automated tool and you can fill in new variables and data in it on the go.
Using a proper retail scheduler, you can perform multiple tasks at once.
The best in employee scheduling software for retail is that it automates everything that can be automated from shift assignments to salary calculations and working hours calculations for each employee and a team as a whole. You can automatically create an optimal rotation schedule for shop assistants, cashiers, guards, loaders, and sales floor staff with automatic coordination of shift changes and assignment of shifts to employees including overtime.
Task management is also a part of retail staff management routines. You need to highlight daily tasks, decide on their executors, track their completion, and report on the results. The good news is that you can use the same retail scheduler as retail task management software. It includes tasks you need to delegate to the employees you manage, and besides, you can plan your days and provide checklists for yourself so as not to miss anything. You can set priorities, control the completion of each assignment, and provide notifications about crucially important tasks and timelines for both you and your staff.
When we said that retail point should work clockwise, it was about effective time management too. If your shop assistants constantly are late, couriers do not manage timely delivery, or your warehouse staff forgets about supplying stocks, what happens then? A true disaster! Yet it can also be automated to mitigate the risks that we listed. You need to apply time and attendance management software for retail. Shifton offers this opportunity in its scheduling software for retail for large businesses. The same refers to periods of downtime where there are fewer customers, and most employees are not engaged in workflow. Good time management is what allows you to provide flexible solutions for your team: when you need them to start working, when you need to have more staff in the store to cope with intense customer flow, and when you can provide them with days off with no losses in the store’s efficiency. Just try to provide time management in Shifton, and you may be surprised by how easy it is when automated and streamlined.
Your store’s or department’s effectiveness starts with your team. You can have some assistant managers if you manage a big department to delegate recruiting and headhunting tasks, and you can use retail scheduling software to control the efficiency of each worker to replace them if they are not meeting your requirements or work with their sleeves off.
As you can see, multiple retail management routines can be eased by retail employee scheduling software. With this software, you provide higher results in the following areas:
From a wider perspective, it can help you to build an effective management strategy and set goals for each selling point that are achievable and logical.
Traffic in a selling point is what shows its profitability. You can use software to count customers and export reports about busy times. By knowing your store's traffic and when you're the busiest, you can be more prepared and prevent emergencies at peak dates, i.e., on holidays, black Fridays, or sales times. It can help you schedule adequate staff for your expected amount of customers and avoid arranging big organization tasks or stocking for times when the store will be full of customers.
Retail management is based on numbers: sales, visitors, goods in stock, sold goods, income, and maintenance expenses, form the whole workflow. All this data requires your attention and accurate calculation. Manually it’s a die-hard task, but it still has to be done. When you use retail scheduling software, you can keep all data in one place, operate it, and provide reports that show your management results in numbers.
What data to check and process?
Then you can operate this data to analyze the whole work and improve it when needed.
Efficient team management in the retail industry can make all the difference in customer satisfaction and overall business success. Here are some additional tips:
With a robust employee communication app, you can more efficiently schedule employees in the following ways:
Being an effective retail manager is not a mission impossible, whether managing a small store or a full-fledged retail department. Just remember that your efficiency is based on three pillars, which are as follows:
If the first two are mostly your responsibility, Shifton can provide you with the third pillar to make your management workflow simplified, time-saving, and effective.
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