The Click and Collect Christmas rush – are you ready?
22nd August 2018
Many retailers established in bricks and mortar have not managed to apply the standard of process clarity and compliance in their existing business to their new channels, and have not really managed to fully integrate this new activity into their overall store operation.
It’s not surprising. Customer behaviour is shifting quickly – customers are already moving on from choosing one route from the newer and existing channels; they now use all of them, switching between channels during one purchase cycle and, thanks to smartphones, even during their shopping trip.
And this multi-channel switching will continue to grow, with increasing smartphone uptake and as retailers experiment with free wifi for customers in their stores.
So what do operators need to do differently? The operational challenges come when an existing store operation has to accommodate extra processes, and it is most often click and collect.
Click and collect is great for customers, you can tell by the growing volume of orders your store team handle! Yet many retailers have not really nailed down best practices; they’ve just not been in it long enough and volumes are not at steady state. On top of all that, volumes vary significantly across the store estate and separate e-commerce teams often don’t have a thorough appreciation of the workload involved at a store level. This makes effective salary budgeting for the in-store end of click and collect almost impossible.
That’s why when you use click and collect as a customer things don’t run as smoothly as you imagined! Challenges can be:
- You struggle to find somebody to collect your parcel from, and even if there is a clear collection point there isn’t always someone there to help you
- You wait for ages for your parcel because the storage is miles from the collection point and the storage and retrieval systems are a little chaotic
- You get either no or lots of texts reminding you to collect your parcel because the under-resourced store team don’t get the checking in and out processes right
So are you ready for the Christmas click and collect rush?
If you aren’t, it’s not too late. ReThink can help you set up your best practice and provide you with a workload and budget model to allow you to get the resource levels right in every store now and in forecast salary requirement for future predicted volumes.
ReThink can help to:
- Review your existing processes,
- Draw on learning cross-industry best practise, support you in establishing best practice
- Conduct time study work so you understand your current workload resource requirement
- Provide a model to allow you to forecast resource requirements as your volumes rise
Sarah Chitty, Senior HR Business Partner, Republic said “ReThink not only provided us with a workload driven wages model but also a significant amount of retail knowledge and experience which benefited the project overall. ReThink integrated well within the team, supported and challenged where needed and were always on hand to assist with any queries or questions.”