Give workers a great UX and they will rule the world

Give workers a great UX and they will rule the world

In such a competitive retail landscape, where traditional brick and mortar stores battle digital shopping networks for the consumer dollar, retailers who thrive will be those who invest in the right productivity tools for workers.

It’s no great secret that store managers and associates are at their most profitable when they are informed and empowered, because they have the confidence to enhance the customer experience (and while doing so, your brand) and the knowledge to close any sale. But the challenge has always been how to build a seamless connection with this increasingly agile audience and give them the user-friendly tools they need without making a large, risky technology investment.

We see this as a huge O for opportunity for retailers, because in our professional experience, in Microsoft SharePoint,you have the right tool to manage your information. But perhaps in the past, you believed SharePoint didn’t have the design capabilities out-of-the-box to deliver a UX that could drive sustained adoption.

In almost all other facets of their lives, the world of your employees is mobile; it’s constantly evolving, personalized to their needs and above all, geared towards making their lives easier. If you can deliver this kind of experience within a work environment, you will immediately begin to reap the rewards of a more productive, collaborative and insightful employee base.

At OSC, we have poured several years of retail-focused IP into the development of a new product which acts as a presentation layer over SharePoint and not only makes it sexy, but makes it incredibly easy to use, update and install.

OSC LiveTiles is the first browser-based design tool to support modern user interface (UI), mobile device channels and out-of-the-box integration with external business systems. It empowers Microsoft Office 365 in retail by allowing non-technical users to build UX-rich sites in just minutes, dramatically reducing the time it takes for retailers to see value in your investment, while minimizing the aforementioned risk, as well as cost.

Most importantly, OSC LiveTiles for Retail is entirely end user-focused and gives you the power to arm your store-based employees with the same knowledge as a traditional desk-bound worker for just $1 per user per month. Quick roster check on a mobile phone? Easy. Product recall to floor staff? Immediate. Corporate messages, training videos or meaningful social collaboration? All within 1-2 clicks, on any device, at any time.

Out-of-the-box, OSC LiveTiles is loaded with functionality that is already pre-configured to SharePoint, including Schedule Management, Leave Requests, Individual Tasks and Alerts, Enterprise
Social Collaboration, Enterprise Search, Corporate Newsfeed and Blogs and a Dashboard for seamlessly linking to business intelligence from other systems. Custom apps can also be easily designed and deployed as you need them.

OSC has put together a range of LiveTiles Start up offers exclusively for retailers at NRF 2014. You can meet them at Booth 2703 at NRF, or visit their website for more details www.onlinesc.com. 

*LiveTiles standard pricing is a subscription model based on $1 per user per month for businesses with 500+ users, under 500 users and prices start at $2.50.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 14, 2014
  By Tracy Issel Happy employees means happy customers. Retailers know this first-hand. How can retailers