Dave runs a busy high street retail outlet for a large UK retailer. Over the years, his working life has become much more complex and challenging with heightened consumer expectations, aggressive Head Office targets and vast amounts of legislation. To compound matters, Dave is now regularly challenged by customers who “can get it cheaper on the Internet” and a store team that knows employment law works in their favour – with Saturday and Monday mornings accompanied by a shortfall of workers after a night on the town.

Help from head office often hinders with seemingly never-ending updates on every subject under the sun: new company policies, new legislation, new product information, the latest promotions, forthcoming offers, and of course, the ubiquitous sales statistics highlighting any shortfalls against targets. Despite all these challenges and the huge administrative burden, Dave enjoys his job. He meets new customers every day and has built a loyal local client base. In fact he thrives on beating sales targets and strives to be ‘Manager of the Year’.

As a consequence, Dave has the support of the Head Office management team who are keen to take the business forward with constant new business initiatives. However, the big challenge for Dave is communication with Head Office in his complex world. Every day he faces operational challenges from a smashed store window to staff absenteeism, customers returning faulty products to stock shortfall on promotional, customers complaining about delays caused by faulty EPoS systems to the cleaning company failing to show……. life is hard on the front line.

Whilst Head Office is sympathetic they don’t understand the amount of time Dave spends resolving these issues. Surely, they must see all his calls, emails and faxes? And getting an answer seems to take repeat calls – no one ever seems to be in at Head Office.

How numero helps Dave

The key to supporting Dave is to make sure he has information at his fingertips to answer all his daily challenges quickly and effectively without requiring numerous calls to Head Office. Dave needs to be at the coal face working in the store on customer facing sales opportunities – not buried in administration.

numero has developed a way to support Dave’s work demands through a solution which is easy to use in the store. Dave can communicate with a variety of people and functions at Head Office directly from his till. Generating messages he knows will get a timely reply.

So, rather than make numerous telephone calls or sending chasing emails, Dave can send messages to Operations, HR, Product Marketing, Finance, Sales and Logistics. His enquiries reach the right person immediately and messages will not be forgotten or ignored. Dave can prioritise his messages too, ensuring that Head Office knows just how important the issue is.  And, thanks to a centralised view of all the inbound store messages, any enterprise-wide issues can be spotted and action taken immediately.

Reassuringly, Head Office administers the system and can see any delays or outstanding issues. As a consequence, Dave no longer has to chase each query individually, Admin can intervene and let Dave do what he does best, run his store.

For those business community readers, just think of the costs: half an hour each day on the phone to Head Office across 500 stores equates to 3,000 lost hours per week. The equivalent of 37 people, whose time can be saved with numero.