Thanks to a tumultuous 2020, retail brands are realizing that being “good enough” isn’t… good enough anymore. 

To compete, store organizations are becoming more complex, real-time and data driven. Store leaders now need to seamlessly shift between salesperson, shipment processor, and sanitizer roles (among others!). To survive in the “new normal,” retailers are investing millions of dollars in better customer data and supply chain analytics.

And if you’re a District Manager, Store Operations Director, or Communications Leader, chances are you’re feeling a little bit, well, squeezed.

If you sit in one of these roles – whether in the Upper Field as a DM or Regional leader, or on the HQ side in Store Operations space as a Manager or Director – you’re used to bridging the gap between two worlds that are often at odds. 

Teams at Headquarters like Merchandising, Marketing, and Online might approach you with their own agendas in mind, and you’ll need to push back on behalf of overworked store teams. 

Or, maybe employees in the field don’t quite “get” what HQ’s vision is for a particular initiative or promotion. In that case, it’s up to you to translate for them.

No matter the situation, it’s a tough spot to be in. And with stakes even higher after a trying year of furloughs and facemask debacles, connecting the dots between HQ’s vision and store team execution is even more critical. 

Fortunately, Zipline is here to help. We built our communications and task management platform with the specific nuances of retail in mind. We know the particular squeeze you’re feeling because we’ve seen it (and some of us have even lived it!) first-hand. 

We know the pain of taking yet another call from the front seat of your car while also trying to scan through three dozen emails from HQ before you’ve even had our morning coffee. We understand how hard it is to blow through five store visits a day, then play catch-up on a company-issued laptop that weighs in at twelve pounds and keeps making a strange wheezing noise every time you try to pull daily flash reports. Juggling it all can be hard. But it doesn’t have to be.

Here are three ways Zipline’s technology immediately improves the day-to-day work of those of you stuck in-between HQ and stores:

A platform that your teams (and you!) will actually use.

We get it. Downloading yet another app on your phone seems pointless. (Logging into VPN is hard enough!) And getting your store teams to adopt a new tool on the fly? Forget it! That would take a ton of work, incentives, and oversight. 

Plus, with so many recent tech roll-outs (BOPIS, Ship From Store, New POS) you’re likely worried about adding another training to stores’ already full plates. 

But that’s not the case with Zipline. Would your employees rather use Sharepoint or Instagram? We did the impossible and made Zipline fun to use so adoption is best in the industry. It looks and feels like the apps your store teams use in their daily lives, so there’s really no training necessary. And thanks to intuitive integrations with the tools HQ teams already use – like Microsoft Word and Outlook – business partner change management is a snap.

Everything in one place.

If you’re overwhelmed by the amount of conflicting direction coming from various business partners, imagine how your stores must feel! With so many messages – and so many different places to look – it’s impossible to know what’s important and what needs to get done. 

That’s why Zipline provides a personalized, streamlined view of tasks and messages so your teams can get focus on what matters: customers. All of the information in Zipline – from new promotions to marketing tasks to operational standard operating procedures – is automatically filtered by role and/or location. Store leaders know that the messages they’re looking at are relevant to them, and no longer have to spend valuable payroll hours searching for the stuff that matters. (How many hours do they save, exactly? Turns out: quite a lot.)

Drive accountability with ease.

You know that it’s impossible to move the needle on your business until everyone in the field understands what they’re responsible for and who is on point for what. At Zipline, we give teams in stores, teams in the field, and teams at HQ unprecedented visibility into who’s-doing-what. Real-time reporting shows which teams are paying attention to important communications and which ones are in the red… before it negatively impacts your business.

With travel budgets tightening you’ll need a way to “be” in stores without actually, well, being there. Zipline delivers a daily summary straight to your email inbox that shows what the entire fleet (or a subset of the fleet) is doing. Field leaders can drill down into specific bright spots or non-compliant stores to better understand which stores are excelling and which stores are at risk. It’s like a virtual store visit (just, without lunch in the mall food court).

Ready to see more?

Want to learn more about how Retail Zipline can help you align your store teams and boost store execution? We’ve made our solution easy to implement, fun to use, and useful for stores and HQ alike. We’d love to give you a deeper look. Reach out today to learn more.