Back in March of 2007, RSR partner Paula Rosenblum wrote in a report entitled Technology Enabled Customer Centricity in the Store:

“Managers and employees are a retailer’s most important, and often most ignored assets. The world’s best product won’t sell if a customer can’t find it, and customers will not accept long check-out lines manned by untrained store employees… store managers … need critical information to help them sense and respond to problem situations. ”

Since that time, the need for store managers to be the retailer’s brand ambassadors on the store floor has only increased. The rapid adoption of consumer-facing technologies such as smart mobile devices and social media has fundamentally changed the shopping dynamic. Consumer access to real-time information anytime and anywhere is devaluing many retailers’ competitive strategies. For example, price is less of a value driver than ever- a bad price is a de-motivator more than a good price is a motivator. In an April 2011 study entitled Optimizing Price in a Transparent World, RSR uncovered that while 74% of retailers responding to the study claimed that they “have to operate in an extremely price competitive environment “, 55% of those same respondents said that “it is getting too easy for consumers to find competitive prices “, i.e. consumers have ready access to that information via smart mobile devices. By the same token, retailers have awakened to the fact that consumers now expect a seamless experience across all of the selling channels: store, web, catalog, mobile, and (more recently) social media. In a March 2011 report called Omni-Channel Fulfillment and the Future of Retail Supply Chain, it was revealed that almost 80% of all retailers view the fact that “consumers expect retailers to provide a more seamless omni-channel experience ” as the top business challenge affecting their fulfillment strategies.

But retailers struggle to respond. In a September 2011 study entitled Keeping Up with the Mobile Consumer, about 4 in 10 retailers complained that “mobile technology is moving too quickly; we can’t keep up “. And although social media creates a new way for retailers to reach out to consumers to engage in a two-way dialogue, in these early stages of adoption it appears that consumers don’t want to talk to them, but about them.

That has put huge pressure on the store manager because for most retailers the store manager is the #1 representative of the Brand to the customer. The question is, is corporate management positioning the store manager to succeed, given these external challenges? Our first-ever study on the role of the store manager, entitled The 21st Century Store Manager (to be released later this week) shows that a majority of Winners worry that pressure to manage operating expense and shrink stands in the way of the store manager’s ability to be effective, while average and under-performers worry most that a lack of operational metrics makes it hard to respond quickly to changing conditions in the store. But these challenges are “inside ” the theoretical four walls of the enterprise, and are therefore fixable with appropriate investments in information technology.

How Retailers Respond

The new study shows that over 30% more Winners than other retailers see the opportunities that can be realized by empowering their store managers with mobile capabilities. That is a clear reflection of the #1 challenge for Winners, that “continual pressure to manage operating expenses and shrink gets in the way of focusing more on excellent customer service “. All other opportunities pale in comparison for Winners.

For average and underperforming retailers, the #1 opportunity by far is to implement “better operational management processes and metrics “. This is also an almost perfect reflection of the top challenge that these retailers identified. Winners’ low scoring of both the challenge and the opportunity doesn’t mean that they don’t care about them, but that they have already resolved the challenge. It’s a “crawl, walk, run ” scenario; mobile technology won’t help the store manager if there isn’t good actionable information to work with in the first place. So average and laggard performers know that they need to optimize their store operational processes and implement meaningful metrics that managers can then act on. Winners are already ahead.

But regardless of which performance or vertical group a retailer is in, some opportunities apply to virtually every retailer. First and foremost, managers need to be able to see information about the goods and services that they are offering. They also need good operational metrics that tell them what’s happening “in the box ” when its actionable and not after-the-fact. Third, all of that information needs to be presented wherever the store manager is. Fourth and finally, the store manager is potentially the retailer’s best brand ambassador to the customer, and so needs to be out on the sales floor and interacting with customers.

All of these things taken together create the business case for smart mobile technologies connected to the enterprise for the store manager.