Do your employees achieve the level of internal communication you want to have in your organization?
If not, you’re not alone. A recent study conducted by Aberdeen Group, The Last Frontier: Collaboration in the Retail Enterprise, found that despite dramatic advances in enabling technologies, “most retailers are failing in their efforts to encourage higher levels of communication and collaboration within their organization.”
The inability to optimize internal communication leads to lost productivity and reduced revenue due to things like poorly executed promotions and less impactful product introductions.
“The critical communication link between the (head) office and stores remains a mélange of phone calls, mailings, e-mails and very basic intranets,” writes Paula Rosenblum, director of Retail Research at Aberdeen and the author of the study. “There is little room in these methods for feedback mechanisms or even sharing best practices.”
Rosenblum says the following internal communication shortcomings are common among today’s retailers:
Retailers often work better with suppliers than with their own internal organizations.
The emergence of intra-company e-mail and intranets has done little to improve or streamline communications between stores and (head) offices.
Efficient customer-centricity won’t happen without improved enterprise communication.
The inability to share product, inventory, and customer data across channel organizations hampers retailers’ ability to take maximum opportunity from the emerging multi-channel shopping phenomenon.
To overcome these problems, Rosenblum suggests doing three things:
Consider process first, then follow with appropriate technologies.
Get managers out on the sales floor.
Move from reactive to pre-emptive modes of collaboration.
1. Consider process first, then follow with appropriate technologies.
“Start with identifying process inefficiencies,” she writes. If there aren’t formal processes in place for intra-company communication and collaboration, you need to propose a ’straw man’-proposed process flow. “If this is challenged and changed, you can be reasonably certain the involved departments will be engaged in the shift,” she adds.
2. Get store managers out on the sales floor.
“The biggest bang for the buck lies in improving store execution.” She advocates and alert-based system that keeps managers available to their employees and customers, over a system that depends solely on e-mail and Internet-based messaging.
“To achieve improved new product introduction, promotion execution and an improved in-store customer experience, traditional means of communication and collaboration must change.”
3. Move from reactive modes of communication to pre-emptive modes of collaboration.
Tags: aberdeen group, channel organizations, customer centricity, feedback mechanisms, formal processes, last frontier, levels of communication, product introductions, retail enterprise, share product