The Mobile Frustration
Written by Evan SchumanOne of the fastest growing segments of retail technology today is clearly mobile, whether it’s in the hands of consumers accessing the web or using 2-D barcodes on ads or in employees’ hands, changing prices on the shelf or doing inventory or even processing customer purchases while they stand in line.
But there is a huge IT frustration with those mobile devices when it comes to retail employees. It’s not the fact that most new retail tech capabilities are mobile and experimental, which just begs the data breach Gods to punish managers. That’s less frustrating than infuriating.
No, the mobile frustration is a combination of two things. First, there’s the high cost of those mobile units coupled with the fact that they need to be in the hands of a lot of employees for productivity benefits to be really felt.
Secondly, there’s the reality that a lot of the new mobile devices (especially the Apple iPhone) have plenty of memory, storage and a highly-customizable interface that could lend itself to a ton of retail mobile apps. Add to that mix the growing truth that the vast majority of most retail employees come to work already packing, with some kind of cellphone and, soon, most likely a smartphone.
So this should be a match made in heaven, n’est pas? Au contraire. A wide range of work rules prohibit management from letting employees use their own cellphones at work for retail business.
Some managers fear OSHA rules that might interpret such usage of employee-owned phones as a bad thing. What if there are 140 employees and 10 don’t have smart phones? Do the other employees get ahead because they can be more productive?
What if an employee tries to do some work on the phone when the employee is at home? Is the retailer required to pay for those hours? Does overtime come into play? Some retailers have designed mobile devices to be WIFI-only specifically so that they can prevent employees from using them outside of work.
That said, the frustration is palpable. It’s possible that every employee might want to use their phones to talk with other employees and to be productive and that management would have much to gain. Alas, this is one piece of productivity that simply won’t connect.
-Marc
February 7th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Retailers have certainly been struggling with how to best leverage mobility in the store. This article touches on the key challenges. One are however where Retailers have had some initial success is with the store operations field orgaziation. Retail store execution is a very dynamic world with many moving parts and lots of uncontrolable elements like vendors, weather, products and employees.
For example, a retailer is setting up for a product launch on a Saturday and has invested heavily in advertsing and training people on how to sell and supprot the new product. If with a specific district 50% of the stores have not yet received their product, signs and fixtures before the launch data then the one can predict the trailing indicators – sales for that product.
Some retailers have armed the store operations field organization with Blackberries which that can use at at time to get real time access to leading execution indicators to that that can solve execution problems before they affect the finanical trailing KPIs.
Some retailers are showing substantial impact on sales execution in stores as a result of very targeted and selected applications of mobile.