Enhance Brand Compliance with Cegid Retail Store Excellence
The quality of customer experience depends hugely on how staff and stores comply with brand guidelines. Maintaining a high standard of execution can be a simple process though, especially with the right software.
In the contemporary retail landscape, ensuring compliance with health and safety standards, sales processes, and operational protocols is paramount. Compliance not only safeguards your team and customers but also supports smooth and efficient operations. Traditional methods, such as paper-based checks, are often cumbersome and unreliable. Today, digital compliance tools like Cegid Retail Store Excellence provide streamlined solutions, ensuring that every store adheres to procedures accurately and efficiently.
Brand compliance and execution
When customers walk into a store, they expect to easily find the products they need, presented clearly with proper signage and an intuitive layout. To maintain brand integrity and foster customer loyalty, every brand must ensure consistent in-store compliance. Failing to meet these expectations can have serious consequences— [a study by IHL Group found that customers who encounter out-of-stock products are 40% more likely to shop with a competitor in the future.]
In-store compliance goes beyond visual merchandising. It also includes factors like staff conduct, uniforms, sales processes, and the overall customer experience. These elements collectively shape a brand’s identity and influence how customers perceive it.
Ensure Reliable Compliance with Digital Checks and Audits
Adhering to health and safety regulations and sales processes is essential for protecting employees and customers. Paper-based audits can leave gaps in compliance strategies, making it difficult to verify adherence across multiple locations. Cegid Retail Store Excellence offers a simplified approach to compliance management, reducing the administrative burden and ensuring consistent procedure adherence across all stores.
Leverage Digital Checklists for Consistent Compliance
Digital checklists are crucial for supporting repeated checks across stores, from daily operations like opening and closing routines to essential health and safety audits. With Cegid Retail Store Excellence, retailers can set up a checklist schedule to ensure timely completion of checks. These digital checklists standardise processes, improve accuracy, and provide real-time tracking, granting headquarters visibility into compliance status across all locations. Store visit checklists further enhance this approach by allowing for the collection of structured data systematically, ensuring all necessary compliance checks are completed and documented.
Streamline Audits with Real-Time Monitoring and Reporting
Real-time monitoring and reporting tools are integral to maintaining compliance in retail. Cegid Retail Store Excellence provides insights into execution gaps and areas for improvement, enabling proactive management of compliance issues. By minimising human error, these tools enhance operational efficiency and ensure adherence to regulations. With streamlined audits, retailers can focus on business success while upholding the highest standards of safety and integrity.
Empower Store Teams with User-Friendly Compliance Tools
It’s been a challenging few years for the retail industry; according to campaign group the Retail Jobs Alliance, one in ten shop floor workers are expected to leave the industry by 2028. So now more than ever, it’s vital to put staff development and wellbeing front and centre of store operations. Cegid Retail Store Excellence empowers store teams with user-friendly compliance tools, reducing the administrative burden and allowing them to focus on delivering exceptional customer service. By automating compliance checks and providing clear guidelines, store associates can confidently manage tasks related to health and safety, sales processes, and more. This empowerment fosters productivity and cultivates a culture of accountability and excellence.
Training that genuinely inspires and engages is a fundamental part of employee engagement, which is why Cegid has developed its Retail Store Excellence Academy, a learning management system (LMS) with fun courses and quizzes for staff to complete, alongside programmes that focus on personal development and growth.
While retail compliance is crucial, it isn’t always the easiest topic to make exciting, which is why Cegid Retail Store Excellence offers interactive training modules to ensure employees clearly understand and adopt brand standards. When staff go above and beyond, it’s important to give them the recognition they deserve, which is why the software’s LMS offers ‘gems’ as rewards: stores can use them to say thank you to the best-performing stores, or as part of a wider incentive scheme to help foster a culture of excellence.
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Enhance Productivity with Store Operations Analytics and Compliance Reporting
Visibility into store operations is essential for driving productivity and ensuring compliance. Cegid Retail Store Excellence offers comprehensive compliance reporting, providing full visibility of tasks and completion rates. This capability allows central teams to track and manage exceptions, ensuring that stores operate efficiently and meet compliance standards. By leveraging analytics, retailers can optimise workforce productivity and make informed decisions that support operational excellence.
Conclusion
Effective store compliance is crucial for protecting your business and ensuring smooth operations. By embracing digital solutions like Cegid Retail Store Excellence, retailers can simplify compliance management, automate checks, and empower their teams to uphold high standards. Transform your store compliance strategy into a seamless, efficient powerhouse.
Customer success stories
GANT
With 650 stores in 70 countries across the world, GANT is truly a global brand and understands the challenges that come with it. One of which is getting to grips with the endless different fiscal rules and local compliance regulations, not to mention how to communicate effectively when dealing with a wide range of international languages. By rolling out Cegid’s POS and Unified Commerce platform across Europe, these issues were swiftly resolved as Cegid helped GANT manage the fiscal and international custom rules. Cegid also provided solutions in the relevant language for each country, while at the same time took care of IT security and PCI compliance.
Having real-time visibility of stock across stores globally was also one of GANT’s key asks, which Cegid provided by implementing one system across all markets, meaning every piece of stock can be traced whether in warehouses or in store. Store staff could also access live reports throughout the day.
Of course, customer experience is the most important part of GANT’s operations, which is why the brand is continually looking to improve its customer relationship management systems. Cegid will play a pivotal role in the brand’s future ambitions, which include replacing conventional tills with tablets and iPhones, developing omnichannel functionalities (such as ‘ship from store’), as well as introducing a new marketplace.
Messika
A small fashion house that thinks big, Messika is a luxury jewellery company that trades primarily across France and the Middle East with markets in the USA and Asia. Currently the brand has 50 stores but is looking to increase this to 70 by the end of the year. To facilitate this rapid development, the brand wanted a modern, well-established tool that had proven success internationally, and opted for Cegid Retail.
Having a relatively small-in house team means Messika can’t deploy large numbers of people ‘on the ground’ any time a new store opens. Therefore, they needed software partners and vendors to provide the right infrastructure to support their development, opting for a subscription-based SaaS model provided via Cegid Retail’s unified commerce platform. Thanks to stable platforms regularly updated with the latest tech, plus a cloud-based subscription model, Messika’s head office teams can now manage their brand development at scale, quickly and remotely, while ensuring standardisation across their 300-400 points of sale.
Messika works from the understanding that purchasing fine jewellery is far more than transactional: it’s an act surrounded by emotion. Messika are therefore constantly looking to improve their customer experience and rely on Cegid’s data-driven solutions and tools to help them get to know their customers fully, to quickly anticipate their needs.
Q&A
How can I measure the effectiveness of compliance training?
It’s not enough for staff to simply undertake compliance training – they need to fully understand it as well. One way of doing this is to test their knowledge after completing each course, but in an engaging, light-hearted way that avoids piling on pressure. On the Cegid Retail Store Excellence Academy’s learning management system, users take fun quizzes to assess their knowledge. This enables managers to reward them for their knowledge while identifying any areas that need further work, all the while giving valuable insight into how effective compliance training has been. For employee engagement, it can’t be beat.
What tools can help manage and store brand asset libraries?
Cegid Design System consists of human interface guidelines to deliver a simple and efficient experience. From layouts to logos, the tool can store brand assets while also enabling designers and developers to be brought together through one common language to achieve that all-important consistency. Perfect for merchandising compliance.
What are the best practices for creating a brand-centric culture?
Creating a brand with a strong identity that consumers and employees want to be part of is key to cracking the market in today’s world. Purpose-driven brands are leading the charge on this front, recognising that today’s buyers want to align themselves with brands who value social responsibility. Sustainable sourcing, eco-friendly packaging and groundbreaking technology that supports social causes: these are all highly effective practices employed by some of the most successful purpose-driven brands today, such as Patagonia, The Body Shop and TOMS.
What are some common mistakes to avoid when creating brand guidelines?
A strong brand is the most powerful tool in increasing customer loyalty and engagement, so one of the biggest mistakes is being too relaxed or inconsistent with their enforcement. AI software can help with this as every team member at every sales point can see and understand brand standards/guidelines immediately.
Another mistake is to overlook or overcomplicate the brand message: it needs a tagline that is to the point and understood universally. Lastly, never chase the latest fad: the most successful branding is timeless.
Discover how Cegid Retail Store Excellence can revolutionize your store compliance management. Explore innovative solutions to elevate your operational standards and create a safer, more efficient retail environment.