Frontline Solutions Key to Successful Post-Pandemic Retailing
NATIONAL REPORT — Whether it’s the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic — which has spurred many convenience store operators to accelerate the implementation of technology — or just the fact that they recognize how essential it is to stay atop their store operations, it appears c-store retailers are rapidly adopting digital workplace solutions.
A recent Convenience Store News webcast, sponsored by WorkJam, a leading digital workplace platform for organizations with frontline employees, discussed how leading c-store retailers are driving resiliency and uniform execution across their brands.
Will Eadie, chief revenue officer at WorkJam, took the audience through the three phases that convenience store retailers journeyed at the onset of the pandemic:
- The Response Phase, where the keys were to remain operational and keep their teams safe and informed;
- The Recovery Phase, where agility, scalability and execution were of utmost importance for fulfilling customers’ needs while operating at less than full capacity; and
- The Resilience Phase, where the retailer is prepared for the next crisis.
The Resilience Phase, according to Eadie, includes clear operational messaging and staff communications, the ability to track and trace as per government-required quarantine rules, crowdsourced coverage to address staff shortages and variable availability (often on short notice), and information security, ending shadow IT in the organization.
He presented several retailer case studies and provided more details on a single platform and app that delivers the most critical abilities to retailers’ frontline workers, including task management, crowdsourced shift coverage, training and communications.
Click here to view the webcast, entitled “Lead at the Front: How Small and Global Operators Drive Forward in 2020,” on demand.