What makes a successful transformation 

Joining us at a recent roundtable discussion as part of the Retail Risk event in Melbourne, retail leaders and experts in national security, loss prevention and fraud shared their personal experience and what should be considered when driving change adoption.

 Defining Transformation and Success 

A recent article I read from McKinsey by Seth Goldstrom sums up transformation today as a holistic process, where the goals and metrics considered are broader than traditional financial levers. Holistic transformation should include improvements in an organisation’s culture, functions and processes or ways to better deliver customer satisfaction.

Echoing this sentiment, many retailers in the discussion had been through technological transformations that had taken several years to fully assess and deploy across their business. They spent time consulting their subject matter experts and business units, identifying the key outcomes they wanted from the adoption of technology, including both financial and non-financial impacts to their business improvement.

Examples of some success metrics from these projects included improvements to the checkout experience through automation at point-of-sale, boosting labour efficiencies by streamlining back-office operations, and increasing market share by offering omni-channel shopping experiences.

 What Drives Transformation 

Unsurprisingly, the global pandemic has been a major ‘tipping point’ for many transformation initiatives that thrusts change upon retail businesses, where the luxury of planning, goal setting and evaluation need to be leapfrogged, straight to implementation.

It was fascinating to hear about some of these rapid changes retailers had to pull off quickly and in some cases, remotely to aid the customer journey for contactless payments and pick-ups. - Many businesses had to re-tool their retail offering and customer service functions that support the new customer journeys such as enabling “click and collect”, online orders fulfilment and contactless self check-outs while engaging a labour force that itself had to quickly adopt from face-to-face customer service to telephone or online assistance. This accelerated pace of transformation often meant increased costs, inadequate or mismatched resources and poor communications.

One of our largest customers, in fact faced a similar situation and Glory Global Solutions was able to quickly provide advice and expertise to help them automate some key processes. They reversed their cash recyclers from staff facing to customer facing to aid contactless payments during the pandemic. Positive feedback from customers and staff has led them to now adopt this set up across their other retail stores.

 Core to the Success

In all cases, the experts at the roundtable referred to people being core to the success of of technological innovations. And this includes both internal and external stakeholders, such as front-line staff and customers.

One of our customers also spoke about their path of transformation in the selection and adoption of cash recycling technology. They engaged staff and gained input from over 280 sites to ensure the effective deployment. The team in Glory partnered with them from the very early stages to ensure the success of the project. The customer also adopted regular feedback loops with their staff, and other suppliers in this tech transformation The staff were engaged right down to where the actual back-office cash recycler would be placed on the floor to maximise efficiencies for their business and help them focus on customer service.

Effective communications resonated loud and clear with all the participants. Cross-functional focus groups, feedback loops, open forums, training sessions and project champions were core to their success. The most successful projects had sponsorship from CEO down, driving the right messages, from town halls to email communications to front-line coaching on change adoption.

So, whether it is a well thought out plan for transformation or a fast-tracked adoption of change, the most important aspects of the change are not the tech itself, but the people affected by the change and pivotal to the adoption. This is staff, partners, and customers.