Transformation has been one of the buzzwords defining the retail industry throughout 2018.
It was the theme for NRF 2018: Retail’s Big Show at the start of the year and has seen the industry move towards a future where retailers embrace new ways of doing business, evolve the ways they connect with customers, blend physical and digital experiences and deploy new technology to benefit both their customers and employees.
And this is an important point; transformation is just as relevant to employees as it is to consumers. Employees and associates are the people behind the magic, who capture the hearts and minds of the customers. They are responsible for delivering the best experience possible and, therefore, should be given the tools they need to be able to do it.
Transformation is also an important word for Rituals, the Dutch company, who are present in 27 countries, that’s taken the beauty sector in Europe by storm to become a market leader. Their philosophy is to transform everyday routines into meaningful moments, something which contributed to their decision to implement Quinyx as their workforce management solution.
Workforce Management for Retail
As Rituals CTO, Nico Wartenbergh, explains: “We have an IT strategy based on the cloud, best of breed and software easy to connect via APIs, Quinyx fits perfectly into this and, more than that, they are a pure player in workforce management functionality which helps transform the everyday in our stores.”
Goran Pavlic, Head of Retail Operations, adds: “In the past we had manual spreadsheets looked after by a store manager. We didn’t know at the end of the day, the end of the week or the end of the month, where we’d end up with our productivity measures or our personnel costs.
“Quinyx, of course, makes our lives easier. First of all for our store managers but also for all other layers in our business. We know at any moment where we stand in relation to our productivity and personnel costs.
“Quinyx translates sales targets and the targets we set for our stores into shifts per hour and it helps have the right person, with the right skills, in the right place at the right moment.”
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And, in retail especially, it’s these moments which become so important because personal interactions between employees and customers, particularly for a company like Rituals, define the customer experience.
Rituals envision passion - passion for their customer experience, passion for their employees and passion for their products. And they obsess about it. It’s in all the details; their value words being highlighted in their office and in their stores, the accessibility in their organisation, the way they serve you tea when walking into the store and the way they hand over their products when you've purchased them. They're not just selling a product. They're selling a beautifully packaged experience and feeling. And they want their staff to be given the best possible tools to help them do it.
Nearly every retail store employee will bring a supercomputer to work, in the form of the smartphone they have in their pocket. This is the same device they use to control their personal lives, so why not empower them to control their professional lives through it, with apps built specifically for this purpose? This is what the best workforce management solutions do and they can transform the way stores operate.
And it’s not just employees who can benefit from this technology. For store bosses, the insight they get from a workforce management solution, and the power it gives them to optimise their operations, is second to none.
Like Yvonne Kramprich, HR Specialist Payroll at Rituals, says: “When I started at Rituals we used to use different spreadsheets for overtime and for our flexible workers and it was a lot of working getting the right figures from these spreadsheets. It used to take us a whole day to do it and now, with Quinyx, we click a button and it’s done in a few minutes.”
See for yourself what the Rituals team have to say about using Quinyx in this short video.
