For many retailers, there is still an execution gap that exists between “HQ telling stores to do the thing” and “in-store teams completing the thing.” These retailers are often still relying on analog signals like in-person visits and anecdotal feedback to measure the effectiveness of their communications with in-store staff.
Communication effectiveness has a downstream effect across a brand’s retail operations. When communications are fractured, poorly structured, or hard to parse, it has an impact on everything from in-store sales to engagement and customer experience. That’s why it’s so important that companies can track, measure, and optimize the effectiveness of their communications.
Additionally, if a company can’t measure how well its communications are landing, it has no way to improve them. Zipline’s retail operations platform surfaces key metrics and actionable insights on what in-store staff need to know and whether tasks are being executed.
Here are the top four metrics we recommend tracking in order to continually improve your retail communications strategy.
Metric #1: Task Execution
Store leaders (and specifically, Store Managers) are ultimately responsible for the financial performance, customer service metrics, and HR management of their given store. Balancing the needs of their individual location with direction from Corporate can add another layer of complexity. Most store leaders spend their days planning shift schedules, checking displays, helping customers, and coaching their direct reports. Executing direction from headquarters is simply another task on this unending list.
At headquarters, leaders will spend time communicating decisions that directly impact the bottom line — the creative execution of a marketing campaign, for instance, or the placement of a particular product on the shelf. But without a proper communications strategy in place 90% of that effort is wasted in the long run.
This is why we believe the number-one metric all retail organizations should track is store execution. In Zipline, this looks like the percentage of tasks your teams complete on time.
This metric will vary from organization to organization, but the goal to aim for is 70-80% completion, all trackable within the Zipline platform. From there, our customers often see continual improvement month-over-month as communication becomes more streamlined and the team becomes more aligned.
Clothing retailer Torrid said Zipline improved store operations and the flow of information between HQ and in-store staff, alongside high readership and task execution rates. “By integrating learning and workforce management systems, Zipline has boosted engagement, with high adoption, 94% readership, and 93% task execution rates, enhancing overall store operations and connection between headquarters and teams.”
Additionally, we often recommend that retailers track the percentage of tasks completed in general (which includes tasks completed on time and tasks completed late Sometimes publishers can underestimate the time a task takes to complete, or haven’t yet established a good synchronous relationship with their labor planning teams. Keeping the “% of tasks completed in general” metric in mind can help chart a path towards a more effective and efficient communications cadence.
Metric #2: Readership
We believe it’s important to always track readership in conjunction with task execution. If tasks are completed on time but your broader message isn’t getting through, your employees will struggle to be effective brand advocates in the field.
For many of our customers, it makes sense to start with the broadest version of this metric: the percentage of communications read by at least a single team member of a store within 24 hours of the communication being published.
Why the 24-hour timeframe? Time and time again, we see that a daily cadence of communication is the most effective way to drive high readership and execution rates. If messages are published in daily bundles, employees will walk into the store in the morning, check Zipline to make sure they are on top of their daily tasks and general business information, and start their work for the day. Tracking readership in this way is a great way to get a pulse on whether or not your communication is driving the right behaviors.
As some of our clients continue in their communications journey, we often recommend they start tracking another type of readership metric: the percentage of communications read by all active members of a store within 24 hours of the communication being published. This is a bit more nuanced, but for larger initiatives, promotions, and urgent messages related to policy changes, it’s often beneficial to understand if these messages are reaching all employees in the store as intended.
Metric #3: Reach
A retail team is kind of like a crew on a boat. In order for the boat to move forward, every different person – from the Store Associate on up to the Regional Manager – needs to focus on the same goal. Misalignment happens when a store or individual receives conflicting communication, which creates competing priorities. If everyone is pulling in a different direction, they’re pulling the organization apart and not moving the business (or in this case, the boat) toward its desired destination.
This is why we believe in getting “everybody on the same page.” In short, our goal is to get every crew member on that retail boat to follow the same set of instructions so everyone knows their part, everyone knows the timing, and expectations are clear. When an organization is aligned like this, everything works more efficiently and it’s smooth sailing ahead.
Task execution and readership metrics will help you understand if directives are being understood and carried out in stores, but they won’t necessarily tell you what portion of your employee population is “on the same page” – actively engaged in the “reading” and the “doing.” For that, we recommend looking at unique logins by level on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your organization.
This is also a terrific metric to use in order to understand, at a glance, which tiers of your field hierarchy are engaging with your communication (and which might need more nudging). As a starting point, it can be helpful to establish separate percentage goals for your Store Managers, Store Leaders (below manager level), and Upper Field Leaders.
Metric #4: Adoption
Zipline has been around since 2014. Since then, we’ve talked to a lot of top-tier retail brands. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s this: No matter how much money you spend on a communication or task management platform, it’s not going to matter one bit if your store teams don’t use it.
We’re proud to say we’ve built a platform that leads the industry in adoption rates. But there’s always room for improvement, which is why we urge our customers to also keep tabs on adoption rates throughout the team.
The metric to watch here is the percentage of new users who fully adopt the new tools within one month of launch. We find that high adoption rates are a surefire sign of an engaged employee population. And, if for some reason adoption is lower than we’d like (usually anything sub-80%), we’ll work closely with customers to craft change management strategies that position new features in the best possible light.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure
Fortunately, Zipline puts meaningful data into the hands of our users, so they have real-time information to drive their respective areas of the business forward:
- A clear view of tasks and daily priorities: Retail team members never have to second guess what their priorities are for the day. Zipline brings priorities into a single view.
- Holistic view of operational health metrics: Leaders can stay on top of business performance with Zipline’s Operational Health dashboard, which gives a real-time overview of metrics like execution and engagement.
- Continuous feedback loop from frontline to HQ: No one is in the dark with Zipline’s powerful feedback loops that capture sentiment like customer satisfaction and promotional effectiveness.
When communications aren’t structured and delivered with clarity, it can be hard for teams to understand and optimize for better end to end coordination and task execution. Retail teams that use Zipline solve this problem and see benefits in engagement and execution.
The Container Store team saw this difference right away.
“We saw a nice 10 point swing in our engagement in a short period of time. It no longer felt like the communication was coming from afar, it felt like it was coming from within the store. That total shift builds trust and trust heals execution,” they explained.
If you’d like to discover how Zipline puts powerful metrics in the palm of your hand, reach out to learn more today.
