Drive engagement and field effectiveness in your (online) stores
Retail execution is crucial for consumer goods companies. It is designed to ensure that the brand, storytelling, promotional strategy and field force activities are perfectly matched and well executed overall.
How customer engagement, field effectiveness and the use of analytics have changed over the last ten years is really exceptional. We have been developing features for our solution simultaneously, and the number of use cases we cover today has grown a lot when I look back at where Pitcher started over ten years ago.
- So what do the consumer goods industries look like in this post-pandemic era specifically?
During the pandemic, we all got to know a different way of working, and many things have changed forever. The pandemic has accelerated the shift to online for both consumers and employees.
The demand for hybrid work, social selling, team collaboration, smart onboarding, training and coaching capabilities has been increasing steadily over the last five to seven years, and it peaked during the pandemic.
One of the latest episodes on the Consumer and Retail podcast is really interesting. McKinsey partners Bryan Hancock and Ashish Kothari offered great insights into the future of work in retail, and it is definitely worth listening for 25 minutes. One of the biggest takeaways is that the most forward-thinking companies are proactively creating guidelines for hybrid work environments, training and coaching employees in adaptability, and re-skilling their workforces.
This is also what we see happening with our customers at Pitcher. We are seeing a shift in the types of skills needed in the field and in the back office of consumer goods companies.
- How should companies manage the new expectations of office teams and field staff?
Overall, we all have to do a better job in recognizing that omnichannel is here to stay and automate whatever we can automate to concentrate on what really matters for our business to develop further and eventually serve customers better.
According to McKinsey, segmenting workload and tasks into roles is a clever way of establishing a new way to create value and optimize time. It’s all about where and how interactions are intentionally taking place with customers and among teams.
Technology can help a lot in the orchestration of workflows and interactions; making the way we engage with internal and external stakeholders, customers, prospects and colleagues seamless and easy; as well as tracking and learning from these interactions for future planning. A seamless piece of technology can make data available whenever and wherever we need it; it’s intelligent and even knows which data we will be needing for our interactions ahead of time. It collects the data necessary for staying compliant and driving our business’ future so that we can concentrate on the activities that are creating the highest added value for our company depending on our role.
- Customer engagement and effectiveness are crucial in store and online, so how can brands make sure they deliver their promises every single day?
It’s all about having a well-thought-out omnichannel customer journey that allows you to personalize messages as much as you can with great retail execution that follows a strong strategy.
According to the Promotion Optimization Institute’s (POI) latest Annual State of the Industry Report, the ability and means to use the data that organizations collect is the number one issue that keeps consumer goods organizations from having exceptional retail execution – and this is a problem that can be solved.
Developing teams, training and coaching people, assigning tasks, establishing quality checks and deliverables are essential for effectiveness. Supporting your teams with strong, innovative and smart technology that’s easy to use and truly helps workflows, omnichannel customer journeys and analytics, should always be highly valued when it comes to ROI measurements and investments for the future of retail execution.
Watch Michael Marzano, Advisory Board Member at POI during the Pitcher House of Heroes customer event and discover more.