What Retailers Want From Workforce Management

A recent survey conducted by Retail Systems Research and sponsored by Kronos found that retailers’ top hiring and managing challenges include:

Attracting and retaining a quality work force: Increasingly, retailers are turning to advanced talent-management technology to hire the best candidates and improve work-force tenure.

Achieving consistent store execution: 59% of respondents stated that over the past three years the amount of work sent to stores by corporate and field management has increased, yet 73% said there is a lack of integration between task and workforce-management systems.

Finding a balance between satisfying employees and satisfying customers: 78% of respondents agreed that over the last three years the role of workforce management has become even more critical to enabling enhanced customer service and driving store productivity.

Transforming sales and labor data into actionable business intelligence: 90% of the respondents considered analytics to be a relatively important component of workforce management, yet analytics solutions are still at a premature adoption stage with only 10% of the respondents having fully deployed labor-analytics tools.

“Retailers need to fix the disconnect between their offerings and customers’ priorities,” said Nikki Baird, managing director of Retail Systems Research. “Such a disparity is a major threat in an age where customer service is valued over price.”