Upgrade alert: 7 signs your employee retail app needs a revamp

Your employee retail app is the digital front door to your company culture.

Is it easy to use, empowering, and up-to-date?

Recent Scandit research highlighted that many frontline workers believe the tools they are given for daily tasks have no impact or actively hinder their productivity and ability to serve customers.

Is your retail employee app part of the problem?

Let’s look at the 7 telltale signs your app is due for an upgrade.

1. Slow onboarding

Getting up to speed is crucial in industries like retail. Especially for gig and seasonal workers who might only be with you briefly.

If workers take a long time to use devices effectively, then your user experience could be to blame.

Tricky to use? ✅
Unintuitive? ✅
Cumbersome? ✅

If it’s a ‘yes’ to one or more of those, it’s time to look at the user interface (UI). An intuitive UI can streamline onboarding by making tasks easier and guiding workers during their workflows.

2. Device incompatibility

Some retail workers use multiple devices and applications during their shifts.

Remembering your laptop password when you’ve been on holiday for a week is a struggle.

So, imagine trying to locate a shared device and remember which apps are on which devices and for which tasks.

Cue head scratching and time-wasting that lowers productivity.

And don’t forget about user experience here too. An inconsistent user experience across platforms makes task switching slower, leading to frustration and confusion.

This is especially true for scanning workflows. Views, triggers, and performance can all vary.

The holy grail? A single device for all tasks and consolidated apps with a consistent experience.

3. Automation isn’t a thing

A human can only work so fast. And some tasks are hard to do manually.

Try stock counting one by one and remembering which items you’ve already scanned.

Or spotting a fake ID by eyeballing it during the sale or handover of age-restricted goods.

Both hard and even harder to do accurately.

Step forward automation. It’s time to make workers’ lives easier.

Consider prioritizing advanced capabilities like ID scanning and augmented reality that provide guidance to streamline workflows.

4. A lack of real-time insights

Everyone spends their working day making decisions.

Those decisions are more decisive when you have accurate data or insight in the correct format to guide you.

If your employee retail app isn’t providing access to real-time data or insight, then decisions will take longer. Or worse, the wrong ones are made.

This has repercussions down the line for operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

If that’s the case, now is the time to find a way to give workers the ability to make on-the-spot decisions when clienteling or managing inventory.

The essential clienteling app upgrade

Turn your associates into high-performance sales consultants

Explore solutions

5. Manual data entry is still a thing

Barcodes helped digitize operations a long time ago. However, workflows still exist where manual data entry is required.

For example, manually adding price and weight information when picking weighted items during order fulfillment.

Or adding a customer’s details to a CRM during loyalty sign-up.

Both time-consuming and error-prone workflows that can impact customer experience.

Investing in capabilities that capture data outside barcodes, like text and IDs, or simultaneously capture barcodes and text can further bridge the physical and digital divide and boost performance.

6. Poor scanning user experience

When frontline workers scan hundreds of barcodes daily, poor scanning performance can significantly impact user experience and productivity.

Barcodes come in all shapes and sizes and exist in various conditions. Scanning inaccuracies or struggles in challenging environments frustrate workers and cause inefficiencies.

Going further, failed scans cause pricing and inventory issues that dissatisfy customers.

Investigating how to improve your scanning UX can have big business benefits.

7. Negative feedback

Finally, there is user feedback.

If users complain about hindered performance or task frustration, it’s a red flag that something is up.

Finding a good way to capture feedback and hear workers’ views can pay dividends in getting the most out of your app and workers by knowing where to prioritize based on their importance.

A great place to start is our frontline worker research. Find out the views of 2,000 store associates on their attitudes to work and technology.