Tech Buying Basics Role of the Week: Store Operations in Retail

Who's Who in Retail?

This week, I was going to look at a banking role, but then I thought, 'banking gets the limelight all the time'. Everyone is targeting banks and anyone who sits in banking HQ. Retail shares some characteristics with banks (especially Retail banks). They both tend to have large numbers of consumer clients. They're managing large numbers of transactions. They're juggling the relationship with those customers and transactions across many channels, often all in the same transaction. And, we deal with them everyday, so we tend to feel like we know them.

But do we?

When we did our Industry Line of Business Survey, the respondents in banking were distributed across a large number of roles like retail banking, asset management, risk management, investments, branch operations, and so on and so forth. In the same survey for Retail, we attracted the same amount of respondents in just 3 roles. Just 3!

[Link]Top 2 BU Priorities, 2022

Now, I'm not saying we can extrapolate that to all retailers and that there are only 3 roles that matter when selling IT! But, I do think it would be remiss not to take a look at one of them. This week, we're going to look at Store Operations because 47% of respondents in our most recent survey came from this function.

So, What Do They Care About?

Making customers happy! An equal number of Store operations respondents chose improve customer satisfaction as did improve service quality (28%). This was more important than topline growth or reducing operating costs. Some respondents indicated that this was in direct response to customer feedback.

What Do They Worry About?

Those in Store Operations are most concerned about supply chain disruption as a challenge, followed by challenges to attract or keep their talent. Talent was a top 2 concern across all retail respondents, but the top issue was specific to store ops.

Store Operations respondents expect to invest in tech predominantly to improve service quality and to improve execution of online-offline integration - to achieve unified commerce. They are also equally likely to invest to improve the employee experience as they are to improve CX. Which just goes to show that, when messaging to business buyers, it can be as important to highlight how you can help overcome their obstacles as it is to show them how you help them achieve their top line goals.

If you are targeting retail-specific buyers, consider drilling down with some of the excellent research by my colleague, Hanna Karki: Identify Must-Have Capabilities for Implementing Unified Retail Commerce in Today's Environment or the Line-of-Business Survey: Retail Buyer Behavior.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.