For several years now, brands have been struggling to engage their teams, even though they are the ones in daily contact with customers. And this internal disconnection directly impacts their sales performance, as well as their employer brand.
To solve this, here is how 3 companies in the retail sector have considerably improved collaboration between their head office and field teams, using the collaborative tools and visual management features of the Klaxoon platform to generate more engagement from their teams.
The need to strengthen collaboration between teams
As they need to ensure an omnichannel presence at all levels, retail companies must be reactive, and think in a way that ensures that each step of the customer journey is seamless and consistent with the previous ones.
With millions of people working in the industry - 52 million in the U.S. alone (according to National Retail Federation, 2020) - it's critical to make sure that internal communication and cross-functional collaboration between teams is extremely effective.
However, the reality is that many brands are still facing many issues related to their internal efficiency.
46%. That's the percentage of teams working in B2C who feel their company doesn't ask for their input often enough (Yoobic, 2021). That's almost 1 in 2 employees.
The same study also shows that in this field, 74% of employees feel they work with channels and processes that are not fully optimized. It is then up to the head office teams to be proactive and to set up the most appropriate solutions.
Eventually, the lack of information and alignment between all teams can lead to a decrease in motivation and productivity, which in turn can impact:
- The quality of the customer relationship
- The employee experience internally (with a high turnover due to lack of engagement)
- And finally, the company's commercial performance
It is therefore essential to implement effective strategies to improve cross-functional teamwork, and ensure that all employees are informed, motivated and able to contribute to the success of the business. This is how visual management has helped 3 companies in the retail sector by using Klaxoon's collaboration platform: L'Oréal, Danone and Krys optical stores.
They share their experience with us through three proven workshop methods:
- Ideation to innovate business practices
- Retrospective for continuous improvement
- Team challenge to increase sales
Visual management in retail: Using large-scale brainstorming to stimulate sales growth
In the retail sector, depending on your products, some periods of the year are key to sales growth: this is how it works for L'Oréal during the Christmas holiday period. Vincent Arcin, the group's Director of Digital Transformation, was asked to organize an internal brainstorming session with strong business impact: find new ideas to boost online sales by the end of the year. He was tasked to setting up this workshop from A-Z in only 5 days!
By combining the use of Klaxoon with Microsoft Teams, two tools widely used at L'Oréal, Vincent simply created a Board (or visual workspace) with two different brainstorming methods:
- The Crazy 8 method: the first part of the workshop consists of generating a maximum amount of ideas with the participants, in less than 8 minutes. The objective is to encourage the teams to formulate their ideas concisely and spontaneously.
- The 5W1H method: once they have selected the best ideas with the help of a Voting Question, the participants deepen these ideas by asking themselves the questions "Who?", "What?", "Where?", "When?", "How?" and "Why?”. This simplifies the decision-making process to find the best possible solution.
Participants can join the Board (brainstorming session) from any connected device, whether it's by smartphone, tablet or desktop. Entering an email address is not the only way to join the Board, they can simply join by entering a pseudonym.
In this visual management space, Vincent gathered a total of 250 participants in a single day, and collected more than 700 unique ideas directly from the field! He managed to set up one of the largest online hackathons ever seen at L'Oréal.
Facilitating continuous improvement with teams distributed over several sites
The Danone group is used to gathering teams remotely from several countries during their annual workshops, including the one called "Ambition Meeting". On this occasion, Bernice, Continuous Improvement Manager in the Singapore region, found that it was difficult to effectively collect the ideas of the participants during their regional remote retrospective.
Bernice chose to use Klaxoon's collaborative platform to organize this retrospective. With Board, she created a visual and interactive space to encourage everyone's participation and engagement.
The time saved was immediate for Bernice. All she had to do was to use the Retrospective template, a ready-to-use Board model specifically designed for this methodology. After a short time preparing the Board on her side, she shared it with the participants, and launched a video directly in the ideation space.
The participants were then invited to add their ideas in 5 zones:
- What to continue doing as is
- What to do less of
- What to do more of
- What to stop doing
- What to start doing
Each idea is sorted quickly, and the group has a clear overview of what has worked or not worked during the year. In less than 2 hours, everyone was aligned on a number of topics and decisions were made. To make the discussions even more dynamic and to keep them on track, Bernice also used the built-in timer feature on the Board.
Following this retrospective, the information shared is centralized in one place, and remains accessible to all participants at any time. This way, regional teams waste less time on information retrieval.
Federating field teams with a sales challenge
Guillaume Creach manages a Krys optical store in Rennes, France. Every year, Krys suppliers in the region organize a challenge between sales teams of several stores. The challenge is to sell the most within a given time.
Until that year, each store played the game on its own, and the main tool used to track results was a physical flip chart. Guillaume decided to maximize interaction during this challenge, and make it more stimulating with a gamified and basketball themed Klaxoon Board.
At the center of the Board, the participants can see a basketball court, where each of them takes his place as a player, by adding their avatar. Throughout the first day of challenge, participants are updating their scores in real time, receiving more or less points depending on the brands they sell. To further boost the competitive spirit, the Board with the counters is displayed in the break room.
Not only does this space encourage follow-up through visual management, but it also allows the different stores to exchange instantly, and to get to know each other better. As a result, this engaging and participative challenge format has increased sales by no less than 30% compared to the previous year!
Make team collaboration easy with Klaxoon
To be reactive at all levels thanks to visual management, retail brands need to build and maintain strong and unified relationships within their teams. A collaboration platform like Klaxoon enhances fluency in discussions, both on site and remotely, and enables centralized communication and easier decision-making.
In addition, it facilitates this efficient team collaboration, saving precious time with ready-to-use templates and methods. Try one of our templates now, or contact our team to ask us any questions you may have!
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