Due to coronavirus, retailers of all types — big box, specialty, hard goods, grocery, and restaurants — have instantly confronted the new COVID-induced operating mode: frontline workers are engaged in entirely new, and urgent, delivery and customer service workflows.  With needs well beyond traditional Store Operations communication, these new work modes require real-time location management, dispatch, and synchronization of distributed work teams inside and outside the store walls, across distribution networks, geographies, and the enterprise.

Digital and ecommerce initiatives to grow customer demand, combined with newly deployed drive-up and delivery fulfillment, have also abruptly reshaped the retail landscape.  The winners in this shift are those able to rapidly and flexibly spin up communications for teams of workers, including instantly joining gig workers, to reduce friction, and keep customer service high.

Similarly, operations managers need an operational control view of their frontline workforce, now including mobile on-the-road workers in delivery and fulfillment. Dynamic, on-demand, delivery workflows result in chaos unless you can see across teams, by worker, by location, task, and status, and communicate in real-time with voice and multimedia.

Lastly, keeping frontline workers safe and compliant is not optional; safety protocol completion and confirmation will be critical to retain customer confidence and staff, both. Easy voice-tag and standard operating procedure (SOP) voice workflows are an essential part of Dispatch/Delivery Operations success.

Things have changed for retailers — period! — and will not return to how they were before. Retail tooling is no longer just inside-the-store systems. Don’t be limited by wifi-based and desktop in-store systems – Orion works where you work, on any mobile client, anywhere, and on any browser from any work location. Orion is delivering each of these critical solutions today with our off-the-shelf frontline workforce platform.  Orion: transforming the future of work.