Retail Technology Insights Features Orion’s PTT 2.0 Collaboration Platform on the Benefits of Using Voice-First Communication This Holiday Season

Logistics bottlenecks, lean inventory, high demand, and a tight labor market collided to create a complex retail holiday season. As retailers enter the endgame of the pandemic’s second holiday season, they’ll need to sustain the in-store momentum that has been building since October.

National Retail Federation found 49% of shoppers started making purchases as deals began in October and November. Even with early shopping, the Thanksgiving holiday weekend saw 105 million people make in-store purchases, almost 14% over last year. While online shopping continued to thrive, brick and mortar stores continue to play an integral role over the more extended shopping season.

Driving Success During the Holiday Retail Season

The frontline retail workforce is a crucial component of bringing customers back time and time again to the brick-and-mortar store. Orion’s Roopa Misra recently shared her takeaways on this holiday shopping season with Retail Tech Insights. Here are her thoughts on how push-to-talk (PTT) collaboration technology empowers retail teams to deliver superior service in a holiday season like no other:

“Each worker is critical to generating an outstanding customer experience from their first day on the job. Retailers must empower their existing, new, and seasonal employees to meet high-customer expectations with solutions that support the experience customers expect at every moment and touch-point in the store.” 

Supporting the in-store retail workforce is key this busy time of year. Misra proposes that retailers examine the voice technology that underpins and connects retail operations from warehouse to retail floor.

“This holiday season, retailers face numerous challenges across their operations that are easily addressed with a voice-activated, intelligent, digital communications and collaboration platform. Organizations that unlock the benefits of digital transformation with intelligent, voice-first collaboration will create a responsive and resilient retail store that will drive profit and productivity unmatched by their competition.”

 

Read the Retail Tech Insights Article By Orion

The Benefits of a Voice-Activated PTT Collaboration Platform for Retail

Retailers who implement intelligent collaboration technology will reap transformational benefits this holiday season and the year to come. Here are a few: 

Improved Customer Experience: A quick, seamless customer experience requires retailers to equip their employees with technology that provides quick access to the information they need, whether that’s retail and inventory systems, best practice guides, training manuals, and more. Real-time voice push-to-talk (PTT) technology also enables instant access to SMEs to personalize recommendations for each customer, taking their experience to the next level. 

Improved Employee Engagement: Engaged employees are critical to exceptional customer service, especially during the busy holiday shopping season. Communication and collaboration platforms engage employees by empowering them with automation and access to information or SMEs that support them at their point of work.

Decreased Phantom Stockouts: HBR estimates nearly 17% of stockouts are phantom stockouts. Communication and collaboration platforms help retail associates tackle the issue with greater precision for inventory lookup, item location, in-store picking, and real-time communication between store employees and managers. During a holiday season plagued by logistics bottlenecks, retailers can avoid the phantom-stockout pitfall and ensure every customer finds the items they need. 

Increased Operational Control: The high foot traffic and purchasing volume of holiday shopping add significant complexity to holiday retail operations. To compensate, managers need greater visibility and operational control. Successful teams use each voice, text, image, or video captured by their collaboration platform to analyze and enhance productivity. Advanced location services also show the location of each team member, providing invaluable information and increasing productivity. 

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The Orion Collaboration Platform for Retail

Orion’s powerful PTT 2.0 cloud collaboration platform captures each data point to create a voice operations system of record. The Platform provides voice-first multimodal collaboration that includes high-quality push-to-talk audio, text, and visual media available across any retailer’s device. Retail associates seamlessly communicate in flexible ad hoc, 1:1, or group environments and stay connected and engaged with their teams.

AI Voice bots participate in talk groups, performing routine tasks, complex workflows, emergency alerts, and integrating with the third-party software that retail workers rely on every day. Retailers gain unmatched coverage over any distance, on any network, and on any device. Managers improve decision-making with Orion’s operations console, advanced location services that show the geolocation of each employee, and archiving and compliance abilities that record, playback, and store all staff messages and interactions. 

Ultimately, retailers implementing Orion’s PTT 2.0 collaboration platform unlock innovation organization-wide and set themselves and their frontline retail workforce up for success during the holiday retail season.

Learn How Orion Transforms Retail Operations

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Navigating The 2021 Retail Holiday Season

The 2021 holiday season is already posing significant challenges to retailers. One of the greatest challenges for retailers this year will be overcoming a tight labor market while combating high employee turnover, hiring and training seasonal employees, and making sure customers stay engaged and happy during one of the year’s most stressful and trying times for retailers and consumers alike.

This year, the retail industry is expected to add over 700,000 seasonal holiday workers — all while managing their existing, often disengaged workforce. This retail period is key to delivering profit for retailers, but this challenging workforce environment could ultimately create a drag on retailers’ profitability. So how can retailers prepare their workforce to thrive this challenging holiday season?

Table of Contents

Learn How Orion Transforms Retail Operations

Meeting Customer Expectations with an Exceptional Retail Workforce

According to RSR Research, 58% of leading retailers admit they are struggling to meet changing customer expectations of a seamless experience across digital and physical touchpoints. Retailers need to equip their workforce with technology that supports their ability to provide a consistent and exceptional customer experience — no matter how they shop this holiday season.

While e-commerce is growing, shoppers are proving that they still want that personalized experience that can’t be achieved by shopping online at home. In fact, Forrester predicts brick-and-mortar retail sales will still account for almost three-quarters of all U.S. retail sales until at least 2024. This pattern shows the in-store experience is irreplaceable.

Brick-and-mortar stores are retailers’ opportunity to engage directly with their customers and are the most important physical touchpoints with consumers. Customer experience is formed by employee touchpoints from the drive-up lane to curbside pickup and from the aisles to the register. However, new seasonal employees can make or break a customer’s experience.

Adding seasonal employees into this high-stakes environment makes for a risky business situation. On the one hand, retailers need extra help during their busiest time of the year. On the other hand, retailers need to make sure customers are happy and receive the best service possible. The fact is that this exceptional service will lead to more upsells and cross-sells.

It’s mission-critical for retailers to do everything they can to make sure seasonal (and full-time!) employees are prepared.

Orion’s push-to-talk (PTT 2.0) communication and collaboration platform fits this need. Retailers empower and connect their frontline retail workforce with voice, text, and multimedia on any device. Bonus? Orions’s intelligent communication and collaboration technology offers many more transformative benefits for retail workers — new, seasonal, and experienced alike.

Here are 4 ways retailers can use Orion’s Push-to-Talk 2.0 collaboration platform to build a thriving operation with a faster, smarter workforce this 2021 holiday season:

#1: Seamlessly Train and Integrate Seasonal Employees

The first key to a successful holiday season is getting new and seasonal workers up to speed fast. All retailers know that reduced training time hurts the bottom line. Translation: All associates need to be trained — Day One/Minute One — on how to support critical functions like same-day fulfillment, BOPIS/BOPAC, register operations, customer service, and more.

Retailers that deploy communication and collaboration platforms empower new (and existing) workers with voice-driven access to training manuals and best-practice guides at the point of work. New employees seamlessly retrieve information to better serve customers on their first day on the job. From any point on the floor, they can access information like the process for accepting a check, pricing on a specific product, or store policies on returns.

As frontline workers gain confidence in the store process and protocols, they can perform more advanced tasks crucial to making personalized recommendations, cross-sells, and upsells to customers. Retail associates connect to SMEs like sommeliers or tech experts to answer questions in any store or at headquarters. Ultimately, retail associates are seamlessly onboarded, using voice to access critical information from their point-of-work — all while staying heads-up and focused on customers.

#2: Increase Productivity and Performance

In this tight labor market, retailers need to supercharge their retail associates with technology that enables them to accomplish more.

AI Voice-Driven Process Automation and Intelligence

Orion Voice Bots and Workflows enable seasonal retail associates to act faster and smarter while remaining heads-up with customers. Voice AI workflows coupled with integration to the store’s inventory, operations, or fulfillment databases empower associates who are working hard to meet customer expectations during the holidays.

Let’s take one example: A customer asks if a certain item will be back in stock soon. Traditionally, an associate would leave the customer and search for the required product and corresponding stock information in a POS system. This is time-consuming and takes the focus off the customer. Orion’s intelligent collaboration platform allows the associate to request the information in seconds with a voice trigger. The customer gets answers fast, and the associate remains heads-up and engaged, able to answer more questions, help more customers, and ultimately increase product throughput.

Store System Integrations

The Orion platform uses automation and integrations with store systems to revolutionize customer service. Orion Voice Bots notify employees when customers trip motion sensors in sections with high-end goods or ring a buzzer for access to a locked case. Associates receive a notification to respond to the customer request, with more frequent, subsequent reminders as time goes on. If no associates are available, the notification escalates to a manager to resolve, ensuring no request goes unanswered. Retailers gain assurances that associates and managers capitalize on every customer’s request — even when resources are stretched thin during the busy holiday season.

Omnichannel Holiday Shopping Support

Big-box retailer Target saw same-day pick-up or delivery channels increase 60% in Q3 this year, foreshadowing high growth in omnichannel shopping demand this holiday season.

Orion’s automation assists with fulfilling omnichannel orders by notifying associates of new orders, when orders are ready, and more. Associates are always connected, even from the curb, parking lot, or on a delivery run. Customers benefit from faster fulfillment times for BOPIS, BOPAC, and same-day delivery.

Instant Holiday Merchandise Experts

Orion also amplifies each employee’s performance with access to SMEs, making each employee an instant expert — even seasonal employees. Let’s say a customer asks an associate which wine best pairs with a particular holiday meal. The associate uses Orion PTT 2.0 to ask the company’s wine expert — whether the SME (sommelier) is located in the store, in a region, or at headquarters — and receives real-time, expert advice on which wine the customer should purchase.

Orion enables seasonal associates to provide fast, superior customer service, and retailers enable their workforce to accomplish more with less during their busiest time of the year.

Learn about Intelligence Amplification for Retail

#3: Engage Employees When It Matters Most

E-commerce is rising faster than ever, but 60 to 70% of shoppers indicate that they will research both online and in-store before making a purchase this holiday season. As shopping behavior changes, retailers have to focus on creating a stellar in-store holiday shopping experience in order to keep them coming back to the brick-and-mortar store.

Retail employee engagement is a critical component of building this positive customer experience during the holidays. Unfortunately, as many as 1 in 3 U.S. retail workers are disengaged from their work — a direct, negative impact on sales and customer satisfaction. If your current workers are already disengaged, what kind of message is that sending to your seasonal new hires?

Intuitive Technology

One immediate way to increase employee engagement is to provide technology that makes their jobs more fulfilling. Gallup estimates that Gen Z and Millennials make up 46% of the full-time workforce. This growing segment of the retail workforce lives in a technology-driven world and workers expect employers to provide intuitive, intelligent technology to support them at work in ways similar to their technology experiences at home.

Orion’s PTT 2.0 platform offers a superb experience with a single interface that supports communication and access to SMEs and store information. With Orion, retailers can use powerful, intuitive technology to motivate retail associates — veteran and seasonal alike. When retail associates are better equipped to perform their job, they are more likely to provide greater value to the customer experience, ultimately resulting in more upsells and cross-sells for retailers.

Team Collaboration

Retail collaboration technology enables associates to more easily and efficiently communicate with their teams. When associates are connected with their co-workers, they are more supportive of the mission of ensuring shoppers have the best holiday shopping experience.

Orion’s PTT 2.0 platform enables associates to use multimodal collaboration with high-quality push-to-talk audio and multimedia to connect in groups or 1:1 with managers and individual team members. Orion provides real-time language translation too, so multilingual teams can communicate no matter their language.

When employees have a better experience, customers will have a better shopping experience.

Learn how Orion digitally transforms store operations

#4: Improve Operational Control Over Busy Retail Organizations

Deloitte predicts holiday shopping sales could rise by 9% this year, requiring stores and supply chains to run smoothly to meet soaring demand. Retail managers are a critical component in ensuring a profitable holiday shopping season. Store managers wear many hats as they handle the retail floor workforce and support associates as they drive sales, fulfill omnichannel orders, and satisfy customer expectations.

Advanced Location Services

During the frenetic holiday shopping season, managers especially need greater organizational visibility across the retail floor, stock room, and even the parking lot as associates fulfill BOPIS/BOPAC orders. Orion’s collaboration platform provides management with a detailed view of their workforce and operations from an individual store, regional center, or headquarters.

Retailers use advanced location services to view a complete map of their workforce in real time. Drivers, warehouse employees, and retail floor associates are all instantly accessible, helping retailers respond to dynamic customer demands and redeploy resources fast.

Flexible Group Communications

The holiday shopping season requires fast thinking, instant collaboration, and dynamic responses when assisting customers. Orion’s Operational Control comes with ad hoc 1:1 or limited group environments to help managers and associates quickly address urgent, evolving, or dynamic issues. Managers are able to seamlessly coordinate with specific team members without distracting others from their tasks. This comes in handy when reminding team members to collect shopping carts from the parking lot, redirecting store associates to busy shopping aisles, supporting new or seasonal hires, or even responding to shoplifting.

Analysis and Optimization of Holiday Season Strategy

Each data point generated by the wealth of communication and location information is recorded and stored. Retailers gain insights into their real-time holiday operations and are able to measure and analyze the entire message stream. From there, managers can turn this information into useful insights to enhance customer service, improve operations, and drive profit during this critical period.

The Orion Collaboration Platform for Retail

Transform the Holiday Shopping Season With Orion

Retailers and customers are preparing for a holiday shopping season like no other. Digital transformation is critical for retailers, especially for the seasonal frontline workers who are critical to creating a stellar shopping experience.

Workforce constraints are a challenge, but communication and collaboration technology offer a unique opportunity for long-lasting, impactful transformation. Orion’s intelligent collaboration platform and push-to-talk 2.0 system is a cloud-based SaaS platform that enables retailers to deploy in a single day, offering rapid scalability. Retailers instantly gain a Voice Operations System of Record, allowing them to optimize operations in real-time.

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Today’s retail environment is as challenging and competitive as ever. Retailers must provide superior service, requiring workers to manage thousands of SKUs, assist with omnichannel order execution, accommodate spikes in customer volume, execute new protocols for safety and compliance, offer expert product advice, and more.

This post is co-authored by Greg Albrecht, Co-Founder and CTO, Orion Labs and Colin Goodwin, ISV Business Development Manager, Zebra Technologies Corporation.

Retail executives know providing this exceptional customer service is key to the bottom line and need solutions that support customer service, reduce costs, increase sales, and speed operational throughput. To do this, retail organizations must invest in the right technology that empowers workers with fast access to information, reduced training times for new employees, and optimization and automation of routine processes.

As partners, Orion and Zebra help solve these everyday challenges for retailers. Orion’s voice-first, intelligent collaboration platform improves workforce productivity and employee engagement. And Zebra’s retail solution connects people, assets, and data to help retailers make better decisions in real-time. Orion and Zebra’s combined solution for the retail workforce supports the realities of customer-facing roles with voice-activated collaboration and access to information, enabling workers to stay engaged while offering a superior retail experience.

Together, Orion and Zebra systems provide always-on, scalable solutions that offer improved employee collaboration, productivity, visibility, and customer experience through operational control, process automation, and intelligence amplification that connects on-the-floor workers to SMEs and systems providing the knowledge they need to do their jobs expertly and confidently.

Learn more about Orion for Retail

Operational Control

Orion and Zebra provide operational control by connecting workers to teams, regional managers, and headquarters, enabling organizations to coordinate and centralize operational visibility across the enterprise from warehouse, distribution, transportation to store operations, and department and regional managers.

This access to centralized visibility enhances decision making and productivity and ensures managers know precisely where workers are located on-premises — down to the aisle. Added precision decreases response times to requests for assistance with customers or the redeployment of workers to high-traffic areas like busy cashier registers.

Real-time visibility into inventory also assists in eliminating human error. Orion is the voice operations system of record, and Zebra provides the real-time data workers need to ensure they always have the most up-to-date information. Retail executives need assurance that their workers have access to the latest information on inventory levels, products, and promotions.

The combination of Orion’s voice-first solution with Zebra’s operations technology assures managers that floor workers use the real-time data that best serves customers and increases productivity.

Process Automation

Together, Orion and Zebra automate routine and procedural tasks that people do every day, allowing them to better focus on improving the customer experience and increasing product turnover.

Game-changing, automated workflows support fast action by retail employees. Workers use Orion’s voice-first, intelligent platform to query Zebra’s system and kick off workflows. Voice triggers or requests provide access to the store’s inventory or operations databases, allowing workers to remain heads-up and hands-free as they engage customers, restock shelves, move inventory, access product information, and more.

In omnichannel commerce, process automation improves execution for online order pick-ups and customer fulfillment. Automated workflows also help retailers reduce customer wait times by optimizing register back-ups and locked case requests. In other examples, workers can kickstart the restocking of items using workflow voice commands that begin the process by alerting workers responsible for restocking, querying stock levels, and ordering more products if needed.

Orion and Zebra combine to enable these workflows that don’t take employees away from their point of work. Automating or even eliminating routine steps ultimately increases sales and improves customer response time by creating more time to focus on the store’s unique retail experience.

Intelligence Amplification

Many organizations turn to artificial intelligence (AI) technology that seeks to replace workers with robots. Alternatively, Orion believes in the intelligence amplification (IA) of workers. Intelligence amplification aims to empower retail workers at the point of work — wherever that may be.

Retailers oversee workers routinely distributed across inventory stock rooms, management offices, the retail floor, and check-out. Challenges arise when retailers need to communicate product and promotion information of thousands of SKUs to employees in real-time. Hands-free, voice-activated solutions ensure workers have access to the right information in real-time with instant access to experts and retail systems like Zebra.

This need is particularly critical in environments requiring heavy expertise in merchandise like wine, beer, and liquor, hardware supplies, sporting goods, or technology stores. These stores need to support their retail associates with access to SMEs with the expertise or knowledge to immediately assist customers without leaving the floor or calling for back-up.

Intelligence amplification also ensures all workers are ready and productive on Day 1. In an industry with a high-turnover and/or seasonal workers, retailers are assured that new workers have immediate access to the information they need to get up to speed fast. This reduces training times for new hires by providing voice-activated access to enterprise-wide expertise.

Orion and Zebra immediately enable employees to deliver value at their point of work and provide the highest customer service levels.

Always on. Always Secure. Always Available on Any Network.

Orion supports the always-on ability to communicate with teams of any size, including unlimited groups, 1:1 communication, and mass communication — from the registers to the back office, from delivery drivers to loading docks, and floor managers to security teams. Message storage, playback, and archival abilities ensure workers never miss a message. Orion likewise supports retail operations that manage their entire supply chain, connecting workers in distribution centers to logistics counterparts to individual stores or to headquarters.

No matter the distance, Orion supports the highest quality of multimodal communications with voice, text, files, video, or images across any network, including LTE (5G-ready), private LTE (CBRS), Wi-Fi, satellite, and mesh.

Orion and Zebra for the Retail Industry

The retail industry is under extraordinary pressure to modernize and digitally transform across the enterprise. New omnichannel business models, competitors, evolving consumer expectations, employee safety protocols, and complex supply chains all drive the need to improve efficiency, productivity, and customer experience.

Together, Orion and Zebra uniquely meet the needs of retail customers that are implementing digital transformation strategies and modernizing operations and worker collaboration.

Learn more about Orion     Learn more about Zebra

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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.