Good communication in retail—so important, but so hard.
When it comes to communication, the odds are stacked against retailers. That’s because store teams are remote and usually (if they’re doing their job well) not in front of a computer. The bigger the chain and the more product you sell, the more complex it all gets—the more communication inefficiencies cost you.
But how well and how quickly your teams communicate with one another determines whether stores can successfully serve customers and make sales targets.
CB4 is up to the challenge. Our mission is to build simple, revolutionary solutions that make the in-store experience easier and more rewarding for store teams and their shoppers.
Part of that is anticipating what customers want. To help stores do this, each week we send them a list of SKUs that customers really want and that they can sell more of now. Each store’s unique selling patterns and operating conditions determine what’s on the list—so no two stores ever get the exact same recommendations.
The other part is empowering stores to give it to them. Here are 3 ways our newest feature—CB4 messaging—helps stores communicate better and get more done, faster.
Store managers are escalating vendor issues to category managers and merchandisers who can act fast to resolve them.
When was the last time all your vendors delivered all your orders on-time and in full to every store? Probably never. Vendor errors and outages are constant and you don’t have time to solve them all.
But you can use CB4 to figure out which ones cost you the most in revenue each week and start there.
And now, with our new messaging feature, you can also fix them faster.
One time, our app notified convenience store store manager Joe that he was losing $143 in revenue from Orange G2 sales each week for the last few weeks. He checked the display cooler and saw that the G2 slots had Orange Gatorade where Orange G2 should be. When the Pepsi rep came the next day, Joe asked him to fill it up on Orange G2. The rep said it was out of stock and faked the shelf out with Orange Gatorade again. Joe knew he was losing money and disappointing his customers.
Here’s what he did… Follow along below the product images for an explainer.
- Joe shared the CB4 recommendation showing how in demand Orange G2 is in his store with Angela, the beverages category manager. He also snapped a photo of the display, showed her the exact location of the problem, and hit send.
- Angela got a push notification that she had an unread CB4 message. She opened the app in a tap to see Joe’s message.
- As soon as she saw it, she copy and pasted it into an email on her phone to tell her people at Pepsi and get the product delivered. In a few days, Joe’s vendor rep showed up with the Orange G2. Lost sales were restored.
When Angela reached out to Pepsi, her request was backed up with evidence of lost revenue from CB4. It was even stronger thanks to the photo evidence Joe shared. With CB4 messaging, she had these at her fingertips to share with Pepsi in a click. No lost time. Sales of Orange G2 increased by $184 during the evaluation period as a result.
Store managers are sharing tricks for selling CB4-recommended products with their peers.
In the above example, Joe knew exactly why the G2 wasn’t selling and what he needed to do to sell it. But sometimes, a store manager doesn’t know how to improve sales. Here’s what happened at an apparel store and how messaging helped the store manager quickly get sales back on track.
Store manager Katie received an alert that a men’s graphic tee shirt could sell more in her store. She checked the display and saw the tee sitting there nicely folded with a good size range represented.
She opened CB4 messaging and headed to the “Store Managers” group chat. Here’s how it went down step-by-step:
- Katie sent a message asking her team how they’d been merchandising the tee.
- A Store Manager in another state got a push notification for a new message and clicked into the Store Managers chat. He saw Katie’s message, the graphic tee display, and snapped a pic. He sent it back to Katie to show how he had double exposed it on the face out.
- A third Store Manager saw the push notification, too. She headed to her graphic tee section where she had merchandised the tee and a very similar tee right next to each other.
Instead of having to open another app or leave the floor to head to a back office computer, Katie got fresh merchandising ideas on the spot, courtesy of her team. What happened next? You guessed it—sales of the graphic tee shot up, earning Katie’s store $199 in new revenue during the evaluation period.
Field leaders can spot issues happening in many stores and resolve them.
There’s another kind of knowledge sharing going on in group chats in CB4.
Recently, territory manager, Sandra, noticed (via CB4’s dashboard) that a lot of stores in her territory were getting alerts that they could sell more beef jerky. They were responding in the free text that they had put it behind the counter or had stopped ordering it altogether because it’s a high-theft item.
She shared the recommendation with the marketing team and asked that they update the planogram so that beef jerky could go closer to the cashier for safe-keeping. Marketing got Sandra’s message and made the change.
Here’s what she did next:
- She headed to her group chat for regional managers in her territory and shared the beef jerky trend she’d found in CB4. She told them about the resulting change to planogram for the product. She even notified the regional managers whose territories were losing the most money.
- The store managers all got push notifications and responded back to Sandra with a check emoji that they’d communicate the change to the stores in their territories.
Doing this all within CB4 saved Sandra time, and her regional managers too. They copied her recommendation into their group chats with store managers. Everyone got on the same page and the tricky, complex issue was quickly resolved. Theft thwarted, shrink shrunk.
At the end of the day, these are three ways stores won with messaging. When your stores and your team can act fast, you protect your labor investment. Meanwhile, when they overcome complex in-store challenges by escalating issues and sharing best practices, the net result is happier customers who spend more.
Watch how retailers like Levi’s, Circle K, and more are selling more in-store with our sophisticated (but simple) AI solution for operations teams.
