Retail Goes Remote: How Remote Work is Changing the Way Retail Works
Known for digital innovation and a strong focus on the customer experience, the retail sector is now expanding that innovation to encompass the employee experience. Apple has announced plans to trial hybrid work among its retail staff, and others are following suit. Dixons Carphone announced its decision to introduce hybrid work, commenting that “it’s about enabling everyone to perform at their best, regardless of location, in a way that’s productive, effective and supports wellbeing.”
One advantage of supporting a remote or hybrid work environment is that it gives retailers more opportunity to attract talent, independent of location. However, supporting a remote work culture is certainly not without its challenges. Chief among those is how to ensure remote teams can remain collaborative and accountable in order to drive unparalleled customer experiences.
For starters, they’ll need to work differently, connecting work, technology and talent. But it’s not an impossible hurdle to conquer, especially when retailers have the right MarTech and work management solutions in place.
Here are three technology capabilities that will ensure your remote teams can successfully support the customer experience.
1. Team Visibility
Gaining visibility into what work both your remote and in-office employees are working on isn’t about micromanaging—in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s about supporting employees with the right amount of work at the right time. It’s also about seeing the bigger picture, so you’re more confident about how your teams are currently functioning.
An operational system of record can effectively give you this visibility by organizing all your teams’ project information in one easily accessible place. With a comprehensive, one-shop to manage work, you’ll be able to see who is doing what on any given project as well as the status of every project. This will help you better prioritize work and balance resources to ensure the right work is getting done at the right time to best support the customer experience.
2. Collaboration and Communication
Communicating and collaborating is a key part of what drives innovation within teams and organizations. While Zoom and Slack can assist with this process, when it comes to creating customer-centric experiences, retail organizations will need more than basic collaboration software.
A marketing orchestration platform that allows teams to share resources and design workflows is critical. It will make it easier and faster to create and deliver experiences to customers. It will also enable remote teams to feel more connected to their teams and give them access to the resources they need for decision-making.
When combined with a work management solution, the right marketing orchestration technology provides access to mission-critical data. It allows marketing, sales, customer service and executives to share information, keeping everyone on the same page, and top business goals aligned with the work teams do.
3. Digital Asset Management
One serious concern with remote teams is effectively managing the process of creating, approving, and publishing assets. If there’s not a good system of record, it’s easy for feedback to contradict, get lost or result in version confusion. These issues can lead to poor brand compliance and a poor customer experience.
By using a digital asset management solution, all assets get stored in a centralized and accessible place for all teams. This eliminates version confusion and ensures consistent feedback. Additionally, all feedback is available to all team members in real-time.
Bring All Your Work Together Remotely
Retailers can succeed with remote teams so long as they have a foundation of digital tools that support remote work. The key is to narrow down solutions by using technologies that tackle remote teams’ most significant challenges: visibility, collaboration, and communication.
Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager check all the boxes. The two solutions integrate seamlessly, are built in the cloud, and allow remote teams to manage the entire marketing workflow—from creation to publication—from a single, centralized source of truth.
When combined, Adobe Workfront and Adobe Experience Manager allow everyone to stay on top of upcoming deadlines, track progress, and have visibility into what tasks each team member is working on. Adobe Workfront also gives greater visibility into remote teams’ performance by making it easy to measure key project metrics like on-time project delivery, the number of projects delivered in a set time period, and time tracking.
Finally, Adobe Workfront allows for communication directly within the platform, so there is a system of record of all questions, concerns, ideas, and comments for each project. Thus, team members can easily refer to information as needed regardless of where they’re working. This makes it easier to unite each department’s goals and strategies to help them reach the ultimate goal: to deliver a better customer experience.
