The Digital Workplace, a response to the new challenges of commerce
In an increasingly competitive and complex environment, the digital transformation of commerce is more necessary than ever. Thanks to the omnicanality and digitisation of the point of sale, distribution players are equipping shop teams with the knowledge they need to support customers in their purchasing journey.
With a Digital Workplace, retailers are able to federate all their employees around the company's strategy, improve operational efficiency, but also mobilise collective intelligence. These are three key areas that are now essential to better respond to the ultimate challenge of customer experience.
Connected sales outlets and salespeople
By connecting all the company's sites (head office, sales outlets, storage facilities), the Digital Workplace is the vehicle for providing each employee with information about the company, its environment and its strategy. Everyone is thus better able to understand and take ownership of the decisions taken, whether it concerns the launch of new products, promotional operations or the year's sales objectives.
Thanks to its document management functions, the Digital Workplace centralises operational information (product characteristics, after-sales service procedures, commercial regulations, etc.) and makes it easily accessible to everyone. Genuine knowledge bases can even be set up to access the right information more quickly, for example to respond to a customer.
An instrument for operational collaboration
The Digital Workplace also simplifies company processes. It provides, for example, a channel for managing visual merchandising operations. The head office teams transmit their guidelines and the tasks to be carried out by the shops and, via the same channel, the shops report on their successful completion, or even report problems that the head office teams can quickly take into account in a continuous improvement process.
On the Digital Workplace, each shop can have its own collaborative space to communicate local information (planned sales events, sales objectives, etc.), manage its activity, the schedules of its teams or even facilitate operational collaboration.
By connecting shops, the Digital Workplace also facilitates interaction between them. Faced with an operational problem, one of them can quickly identify the colleague likely to provide a solution and get in touch with the right contact.
Mobilised collective intelligence
Through collaborative spaces, this transverse dimension can be widely used to benefit even more from collective intelligence. By associating, for example, the experts of the sales outlets with the strategic reflections carried out by the management. By involving employees in participative innovation approaches. Or, again, by encouraging the sharing of knowledge and good practices, for example within communities by type of department.
This collaborative dynamic that the Digital Workplace encourages and welcomes can even make it an essential organ for better listening to the field, with a view to always better capturing consumer expectations and changes in purchasing behaviour. This is an increasingly crucial monitoring issue, in the context of the uncertainty caused by the health crisis.
