Lessons Retail Teams can Learn From Digital Teams

Learnings from digital teams to harness the strategic value of your retail team

Embracing digital strategies can significantly boost a retail team’s top-line growth. Even though traditionally, these teams focus on cost and compliance. Q5 offers insights into how retail digital transformation within retail teams can enhance customer experience, leverage analytics, and play a strategic role. Therefore, allowing them to become key drivers of business growth.

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I recently sat down with Matt Phelan, Q5’s Head of Retail, to discuss the current strategies of retail teams. In-store sales account for c.80% of revenue for omnichannel brands, compared to c.20% from their eCommerce channels. However, when looking to increase sales and enhance customer experience, organisations often underuse retail teams (including Store & Retail Operations functions).

Through Q5’s experience advising many national and global retailers, we observed several key traits of digital teams that Retail teams should look to replicate. Thereby, transforming how the traditional Retail team is deployed and perceived. Currently, Retail teams focus on cost and task optimisation and compliance. However, the ongoing rise of costs and economic pressures is an opportunity to reposition retail teams as strategic value drivers to improve topline growth.

The shape of Retail teams today:

In our experience, Retail teams traditionally focus on four core pillars of activity:

Omnichannel projects
Task/cost optimisation
Workforce scheduling
Store communications

Additionally, teams may have responsibility for activities such as health and safety, property, and in-store services. Whilst these tasks are critical to drive compliance and reduce cost, they have a limited impact on top-line growth.

Retail teams’ capacity to harness their knowledge and experience within stores is often overlooked. Allowing them to share key business intelligence with wider Head Office teams. Unlike Digital teams, whose customer insight and perspective are often used throughout the decision-making process, wider Head Office functions communicate to Retail Teams. This means they are not brought into decision-making processes and communicated with.

The close proximity of these teams to store colleagues, and therefore customers and their needs, is underused in increasing sales, exciting customers, and accelerating the workforce.

A Retail team for the future:

At Q5 we believe there are several core capabilities found in Digital teams that Retail teams should look to develop. Doing this would help them position themselves at the centre of strategic change and drive topline growth.

These include:

A/B testing – test initiatives within a set number of stores to compare their success and ROI properly, before rolling out across the full store estate.
Customer data and insights – capturing customer preferences and feedback regularly by tapping into the knowledge store teams have when considering marketing campaigns, new products, pricing, and promotions.
Analytics – harnessing retail analytics to identify interventions that will truly drive change, deliver topline growth, and support meaningful customer interactions.
Customer experience – continuously reviewing and adjusting the customer journey to enhance experience and in-store conversion rates.
Product personalisation and recommendation – regularly delivering product and sales training within store to ensure employees have the appropriate skills and knowledge to proactively engage with customers and uplift basket size by recommending products based on customers’ unique needs.
Product Management – treat stores as ‘products’ that continuously need enhancement. Allowing organisations to leverage the breadth of knowledge from the shopfloor to crowdsource ideas on how to make store operations more efficient and improve the in-store experience.

Considerations for making this a success:

There are key questions that should be considered when attempting to reposition Retail teams in this way:

Are you clear on your business strategy and how Retail will help to achieve it?
Does your Retail team have the right structure and capabilities in place to deliver this change?
How will your Retail team work with the wider organisation to amplify the voice of customers and store colleagues?
How does your organisational culture support the repositioning of Retail?
What technical and analytical skills and tools will be required?
How will you successfully implement this change whilst building buy-in and understanding throughout the organisation?

To make your organisation successful, you need the right strategy, design, culture, and technology. Good change management is also important for this repositioning. We are experts in ensuring these important parts of healthy organisations are in place to support your goals. By using the untapped potential of Retail teams, businesses can accelerate their growth. They can also increase customer value while protecting their profits.

As always, we’re here to help. And if this is a challenge you’re working through, we’d love to chat.