In The Times supplement on the Future of Retailing, amongst the issues of multichannel retailing and exciting new technology, a small statement from an SAP survey highlights an important operational reality. It said that 78% of retailers see customers as being more responsive to promotions and offers.
Most retailers fully understand this reality but don’t want to give away margin unnecessarily. Retailers are therefore re-evaluating if they are really capitalising on the power of promotions and offers in their stores.  This is partially about creating the right offers but increasing questions are being asked about operational effectiveness, particularly at store level. In other words can they take any actions quickly to improve the effectiveness of offers without further reducing margins?
 
Questions
From our discussions with retailers here are three questions to consider:
1. Are all offers and promotions displayed correctly in every store and can any missing or damaged POS be replaced in minutes?
2. Is it possible to bring out different features or advantages of a product or promotion on a daily basis based on location or changing circumstances?
3. Are head office staff equipped to implement changes very quickly in response to market changes and to avoid potentially embarrassing non compliance issues?
One of the key factors that comes though in each question is speed. Retailers want to be able to do things quicker and easier.
Our engineering team’s way of helping has been to make it easier and quicker to implement our NetTickIT software too.