A short daily video by Anthony Onesto (Jan 17, 2017) reflecting on PSFK’s Future of Retail report, which lists an "empowered frontline" as a pillar for retail success. Onesto argues frontline retail employees need mobile, engaging access to knowledge (vs. inaccessible e-learning on desktop) and highlights peer-to-peer knowledge sharing—citing SmartUp—as a way to surface employee insights across stores and teams to unlock knowledge and talent.
Chapters
Everyone, it's Anthony Honesto and this is my daily burst of knowledge for Tuesday, January 17th. This morning I was in a half day session with PSFK where they introduced their Future of Retail report. And among three pillars of success for the future, one of them was an empowered frontline. And so when I thought about retail, right, and how important it is for the sales associates and the customer service representatives in retail to create great experiences, I thought about how technology is going to have a huge impact on that. Whether it's the ability to look things up from an inventory perspective very quickly, or the ability for companies to share knowledge, new product information, new things to those frontline employees. And today what's happening is they're going to elearning modules on a computer and most of them don't have access to computers at work. So the ability to get knowledge and information to these employees, one in a very engaging way, but two, also in a mobile way, is going to be very powerful for retail companies going forward. And then the second part, which I think is why SmartUp is really interesting in this space, is the ability to share knowledge. So when an employee has an insight or something different than the company doesn't understand or doesn't know, they can share that out into the organization on an exponential basis. So you have employee to employee, team to team, and even store to store, even geographic locations sharing knowledge about consumers and insights that the company wasn't aware of. So you're unlocking knowledge, you're unlocking talent. So that's my daily burst for today. Very interesting report that PSFK is putting out. We'll see you tomorrow.
