A social intranet for retail being the central part of digital workplaces, is a top priority for retailers looking to make up for lost time. As the world stood still, virtual businesses were seen to adopt efficient technologies to tackle demand for goods and services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As eCommerce giants like Amazon, eBay and Ali Baba did face challenges operating during the battle against the virus, many brick-and-mortar stores ran out of business.
Nasdaq reports that, “95% of all purchases are projected to be done via ecommerce,” indicating that prioritizing digital distribution is no longer a choice, but fundamental to retail success in the coming years.
More retailers are shifting to an omnichannel engagement model, to be present on both digital and offline distribution channels since the pandemic.
Retailers are pushed to refactor their business model to adapt with widespread digitization. The world of retail is changing, and for a digital advantage.
An important question that came up during the pandemic was, how to retain retail employee engagement and maintain their productivity?
Using Social Intranet for Digital Workplace Agility
Retail businesses are dependent heavily on customer interactions. Any retail business’s workforce realizes the value of fulfilling customer experiences. Retailers thrive on customer feedback and strive to make their services available to their consumers.
More people stayed indoors during lockdowns, and preferred digital engagements over in-store shopping and one-to-one interactions. The spiking demand for convenient shopping and customer grievance services required technology to sustain retail operations. Inarguably, intranet for retail businesses took centre stage, reinventing customer, and employee experiences.
Retailers found that enabling effective internal communications and collaboration resulted in front-line efficiencies in customer-facing operations. As the modern workplace relies more on digital experience management, the software used must be the best, to beat the best.
A eMarketer report during the pandemic states, “Despite the challenges, the global retail ecommerce sales grew by 27.6% in 2020 compared to the previous year, with a total of $4.280 trillion accruing to an estimated total of $23.4 trillion by the year end.”
Social intranets proved a vital tool to manage content within retail business’s and to govern employee productivity as well as meet consumer demand.
Owing to widespread adoption of social intranets and other digital workplace solutions, retailers could stand the test of a global pandemic by reaching customers on their most preferred channels.
Benefits of a Social Intranet for Retail
Intranets prevented businesses from losing the race against time. Businesses that didn’t equip a comprehensive intranet architecture invested heavily in digital acceleration, as legacy systems were left behind. The direct changeover witnessed in many organizations required a flexible social intranet that’s augmented to suit business-specificities.
Let’s take a close look at how features of social intranets for retail benefitted supply chains and operational agility for retailers.
1. Employee Experience Management
Since in-store and floor employees are the frontline of your retail operations, it’s vital to keep them engaged with productivity hacks and improved workflows. Employee grievances must be addressed instantly in the retail environment, especially since you can’t be everywhere.
The use of a social intranet for retail proves to be a key aspect driving robust communication efficiencies across the retail organization, reinforcing transparency between management and employees at every interval in the value chain.
2. Customer Service Efficiencies
A happy customer is the bread and butter of retail businesses. A frequent problem customer faced in brick-and-mortar shopping experiences was the inconsistencies in availability of certain products. This problem arises when retailers have multiple stores across different locations, being unable to centralize the inventory with the needed tech. Many retail stores improved their self-service portals to both customers and employees, thanks to the adoption of a robust intranet software.
With the use of social intranet for retail, policies could be refactored to handle customer queries faster, and uniformly. You can centralize all your retail stores across diverse locations using one interface to govern all your data, inventories, employees, administration and finances. The intranet software helps employees fulfil their work comfortably, leading to improved services rendered to the customers.
3. Knowledge Sharing
Marketing teams and sales teams are not in direct contact with agents and floor executives. Marketing insights shared across the departments require a consolidated mechanism to exchange information and retain the reliability of internal communications. Using a social intranet for business development signifies that user can search and filter for information they need, at specified levels of accessibility and permissions in the organization.
The improved knowledge sharing due to intranet deployment saves cost and time, while improving decision-making processes within and across departments. The social intranet steers strategic imperatives for everybody in the organization to arrive at a common platform and achieve business objectives.
4. Performance Evaluation
Using user-generated data and patterns, administrators of a social intranet software can easily govern and measure the impact of various activities in the organization. Keeping tabs on the employee experience, HRs can design policy changes based on the needs of the workforce. By understanding the way your people work in various retail operations, you can improve overall performance by deploying more effective processes and succeeding in the quality of data used.
Employees gain a clearer understanding of their nature of work, engaging them with learning and development required to excel at their job roles.
5. Training and Development
A social intranet for retail also offers flexibility with training and development activities. A vast databased of the intranet can be used to record all company data, including training videos, social events, seminars, and leadership talks to engage the workforce. Employees can benefit from customized training resources accessible at the click of a button. Since all data in the retail organization is centralized, employers and employees can easily conduct sessions, team meetings and knowledge-transfers where all employee involved are brought to the same platform. The agility enabled by social intranets inspires more resourceful employee engagement activities, and a sense of shared accountability among colleagues.
Personalize Your Social Intranet Software
Using intelligent reporting dashboards and gamified user interfaces, a modern intranet offers transparency into retail processes, and urges workplace flexibility in numerous ways, as mentioned above. An intranet emerged as a vital element of business agility, especially during trying times of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Retailers can personalize their intranet software to meet employee and consumer demand via award-winning solution – Saketa intranet for retail.
As technology positions businesses with enhanced capabilities for better planning and delivery of their operations, robust systems like Saketa’s social intranet for retail stands atop the list of must-haves for agile digital transformation.
To know how a social intranet can benefit your organization better, engage with Saketa representatives, happy to lead you towards the future of work.
