For every urgent update that a district manager sees, there are dozens more non-urgent or routine communications that flood the zone, making it harder to oversee store progress across many locations and make clear decisions.
When their inboxes are one big TLDR, it’s no surprise that 69% of retail managers say higher ups are not effectively communicating with them.
It’s a problem that Caleb Buxton, Senior Software Engineer at Zipline, has been thinking about for two decades. “The reality on the ground is often different from the ideal view at HQ,” he explains.
Caleb has been building solutions for retail since he was a university student, consulting and developing operations tools for a growing grocery chain on Canada’s west coast.
At the time, Caleb’s approach was end-to-end. He’d meet with store managers each week, prototype solutions on paper, then build, demo, and train team members to use the software that came straight from their weekly conversations. These teams needed solutions that enabled agency and accountability so frontline managers could make clearer decisions and own the results, he explains.
Years later, the core problem hasn’t changed: district managers need clarity so they can make better decisions about stores in the field. But when messages stack up and blend into each other, leaders are left asking the same thing every day, what’s the most important thing for me to know right now?
Turning down the volume on communications overload
To build a feature that addresses one of the biggest challenges in retail operations, you have to start with the scale. Eighty-one percent of retailers use email as a primary communications and task management tool, which means store leaders wade through dozens of messages from the moment they clock in.
“They’re getting lost in the overwhelming volume of communications being sent to their stores,” Caleb explains. When store leaders and district managers are drowning in volume, teams lose track of the latest updates or in-store flare up.
By the time an upper-field (district and regional leaders overseeing multiple stores) or frontline manager gets to their inbox, they’re seeing dozens of updates — some urgent, most not. For area or district leaders overseeing multiple locations, they might see hundreds of communications accumulate and overlap each week.
This is the problem Caleb’s team set out to untangle with Zipline’s new Message Summaries feature: a way to clear the field, so urgent updates can stand out from the rest, giving leaders the information they need to take action.
Message Summaries work by taking disparate and overlapping updates and condensing them into bulleted summaries that cut straight to the intent of a group of messages.
However, not all summaries are created equal. The difference between a good summary and a bad summary is something Caleb’s team spent extra time working through to make sure Zipline users could trust the overviews they were receiving.
Good summary, bad summary
The problem with letting a random LLM decipher critical messages is that it can easily produce “bad summaries” if the style of communication is dense or hard to parse.
Think of the last lengthy voice note you received. It might have had a line about running an errand, a quick inside joke, a question that needed to be answered, a sarcastic invitation to a fake event, and a slightly off-topic observation about a great book your friend just picked up. The question buried beneath all the other chatter might be urgent — maybe a deadline for an upcoming group trip — and require an action to be taken.
A bad summary might highlight the fake event as URGENT and miss the actual question entirely.
“A bad summary totally misinterprets the intent of the communication — fixates on certain points, anchors on them, and elaborates on stuff that just isn’t there,” says Caleb.
“The agent comes up with a summary about an initiative that doesn’t exist, with actions that look right but totally misconstrue the communicator’s intent.”
Instead, a good summary pulls up the actionable piece first, making sure you know what needs your actual attention. That’s how Message Summaries work. They decipher the true intent and nuances of these communications, not just the broad strokes. Instead of needing to follow complex, duplicated, or irrelevant threads, users get a digest of what they need to know, immediately pulling them out of the weeds and arming them with the headlines they need to get things done.
Message Summaries are held up against a scorecard that checks for hallucinations, scrutinizes the summary against the communication itself, maintains neutrality, and consolidates messages.
This way, when a user opens up the platform and sees a bullet-pointed overview of what they’ve missed, they can trust that these summaries aren’t creating more noise and confusion.
During the development process, user and expert feedback were a big part of iterating and refining Message Summaries.
“We got feedback both on the summaries and the scorecard, because we could see where subject matter experts were using the scorecard a little differently. Then we could tweak it, so that the next time there was greater alignment.”
A better approach to tackling overwhelm
“Retail Zipline has some of the largest retail operators in the world using our systems, which means we can see just how overwhelming the volume of communications being broadcast to stores can get,” says Caleb.
Caleb works on Zipline’s Operate team, which builds the platform’s bread-and-butter communications, tasks, and assessments features. After observing the sheer volume teams were wading through each week, the team knew it needed to build a solution.
“There’s a real opportunity to streamline the district manager’s view into what’s going on by grouping common initiatives across stores and providing a shorter summary,” explains Caleb.
But what’s the difference between this and dumping messages into your friendly neighborhood LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini?
“The naive approach to summarization might be to throw everything in [ChatGPT] and just ask for a summary,” Caleb explains. “But that isn’t going to account for hallucinations, or completeness, or the size of the content an LLM can summarize.”
With this feature, users can now understand what is happening across locations without going down a dozen rabbit holes. For example, Message Summaries can take 25 messages about an in-store incident and summarize the situation, its resolution, and next steps, so relevant readers can keep moving forward without spending 20 minutes trying to catch up.
Similarly, frontline managers can quickly see which initiatives matter most, understand what they’re accountable for, and act on the right things instead of guessing.
Getting teams the right information at the right time
Ultimately, Caleb hopes new AI-powered Message Summaries will help users move the needle on their company’s mission by getting them the right information at the right time. “Where Zipline’s AI work is really shining is in helping the rest of the stores work as well as the best of the stores.”
For Zipline ‘for retail, by retail’ isn’t just a motto, it’s how features like Message Summaries get built. From a career that began by solving on-the-ground problems for a local grocery chain, to working with the biggest brands in the world, Caleb is optimistic about the suite of AI-powered features Zipline is building.
This article is part of Trained on Retail, an interview series in conversation with the experts at Zipline building smarter solutions for the next generation of retail operations.
