store operations compliance Archives

2nd Joy of a Retail Spring – What do my store staff really do?

As retail stores become more remote from the head office of the business, through more diverse and dispersed portfolios, it becomes more and more difficult to know what operations the store teams are performing, how frequently they are performing them, and to what standards. This understanding is ironically more important than ever as stores serve and survive in a wider variety of contexts, graded and segmented in a growing number of-

Why can’t head office communicate to stores in a coordinated way?

“Headaches of a Store Manager…No2” Why can’t head office communicate to stores in one coordinated way? An inbox audit of any store manager’s email system will reveal instantly how well, or not, communication to stores is organised, channelled, filtered and prioritised. Common headaches apart from sheer volume of messages are repeated messages from different head office functions, or even the same function and person, to direct contradictions in instructions-

“What on earth is happening in my stores?!”

“How can I actually know for certain what is happening in my stores and what my customers are doing, and so ultimately know what to do to improve their experience and my commerciality?” It is still a widespread scenario that head office retail functions do not know what is happening hour after hour, day after day, inside their stores. The situation is symptomatic of the gap that still exists-