retail safety Archives

Decision-makers would be more reliable on data, analytics, and context towards providing safety to their retail employees. That’s why some leading organizations prefer leveraging the CEM platform to get location-aware technology and visual risk intelligence. Zapoj CEM is indeed a competent tool to provide a significant amount of threat capability to ensure safety for your employees. Discover the relevance of Zapoj CEM in the retail ecosystem today.

Retail is expanding beyond closed territory into more diversified spaces – dispersed warehouses, logistics, different units of establishments, and more isolated departments to deal with customer interactions and provide customers experience. To offer a more connected employee experience and safety, a

With so many sites to observe, the retail workforce is no longer limiting their services to onsite only. They are more of a mobile workforce today – they are off-field, in-the-air, or on-the-road so that retail operations can run smoothly. Retail growth hinges upon the active participation of each of the workforce from the respective fields. Retail employee safety is therefore the impetus that can ensure unprecedented retail growth.

However, ensuring employee safety in retail spaces can be a daunting task. With half of your workers performing varying levels of responsibilities at different locations- some are business travelers, lone workers, or regularly at office space – organizations, business leaders, and stakeholders are facing new challenges. The inability to ensure employee safety can prove organizational burnout and make employees vulnerable to security and safety risks.

Retail facing employee safety challenges

Critical events are increasing the frequency of physical threats to your employees.

To comply with the global work environment, keeping employees safe is not just a responsibility, but a matter of moral duty. Regardless of where and how your employees are working, they are now exposed to global threats more than ever.

Natural disasters, active shootouts, infectious diseases – and any critical events can be major threat risks to their life and safety. Not offering sufficient employee protection for your dispersed employees can have a direct impact on productivity and final output.

At the same time, retail can sustain operational risks without enough support from its major workforce – operation across front service departments, warehouses, security departments, and more places could stop. This is evidently a recipe for growth disasters as customer experience sinks, leading to a drop in sales, and lost revenues.

Although severe in nature, these challenges are not hard to combat for retail leaders. Location-awareness technology with built-in capability of real-time communication is a critical component that scales your employee safety efforts and ensures excellent efficiency. Leveraging Zsuite CEM, your targeted mission-critical rescue operations can work to keep your people safe.

Retailers can ensure employee safety with Zapoj Critical Event Management

Workplace violence impacts your on-site employees, while a natural disaster or infectious disease can increase vulnerability for both on-site and off-site employees. Location-aware technology in this particular situation provides effective results and accelerates rescue operations for your impacted employees. Zapoj helps you leverage its outstanding features to their fullest potential before and during critical events and save your people.

Gather threat data

Zapoj CEM Suite (aka Zsuite) can pull in data from a wide variety of sources like social media channels, government portals, news sources, and public safety agencies. Built-in AI tools help extract accurate data out of noise or non-validated information so that you can overlay data on the command center and build situational awareness. This gives you the power of risk intelligence into the evolving situations as they change with time. Categorizing risk severity and urgency can therefore become simple for retail emergency or response teams of your organization.

Derive location data

For your increasingly retail mobile staff, a traditional safety system falls short of expectations.
But, with dispersed employees in remote locations or moving between offices, Zsuite can track their locations in real-time using geo-targeted location capabilities. The built-in system allows your employees to sign up for opt-in features, which enhances the geo-target functionality and helps reach the right employee only when impacted. AI-powered Zsuite CEM helps you keep the contact center up to date, so identifying the right location of your employees even if they are away is not a tough job. Additionally, using geo-fencing in Zsuite maps, it will be easier to trace employee locations in real-time and with precision.

You can predict the expected location of your employees- who’s where and when.
Find the last known location of your employees.

Alert your workforce

As threats ensue, the most critical job is to notify your people and keep them informed without making them feel thwarted by unforeseen threat potentials. Zsuite gives you context to threats, helping you achieve an accurate threat picture and build an emergency communication that reaches only the right person in harm’s way or to fall prey to critical situations in the next few hours. Availing the real-time location-based alerts gives you the instant capability to alert your employees with proper SOS and help them get out of danger in no time. With so many critical features like AI-based risk intelligence, Zsuite automates evacuation during an emergency or helps mitigate risks.

Leverage multimodal communication channels to target employee outreach using SMS, mobile app alerts, voice call, and also desktop alerts.
Two-way messaging capabilities ensure confirmation that your employees are safe.
Reduce information fatigue while saving time with pre-populated message templates for faster emergency response.

Zsuite builds situational awareness into its CEM, making reaching out to people in crisis effortless. Different critical situations can dramatically benefit from Zsuite. Here’s how-

In times of infectious threats like COVID-19, using risk intelligence and location awareness technology is the easiest way to get end-to-end contact tracing. This helps you send threat notifications to your traveling employee and keep them safe. The same approach helps with containment and reduces infection transmission in retail premises too.
Situational awareness and effective communication also help you combat critical situations like active shooter incidents. For your traveling employees, you can ensure safety before any critical situations escalate into a disaster.

Improve future response

Zsuite orchestrates its dashboard with pre-configured monitoring capabilities. This is an advanced technology to track and pull in threat data in real-time. Also, it monitors how your response teams unleashed rescue efforts or remediation plans during an emergency. You can get all of this active data as an essential incident report. By auditing and analyzing these reports, you can improve your future response and make your retail operations more resilient and efficient.

Zsuite CEM empowers your emergency preparedness plan. You are confident to protect your people anywhere in the world and in any location while at duty with retail operations. Ensuring employee safety boosts overall operational productivity and efficiency, which also effectively helps improve customer experience, boost sales, as well as profitability.

In a threat-prone environment in today’s world, Zsuite CEM fits your emergency preparedness kit to help you achieve resilience and build customer trust. Ask for a demo today.

IT incident management is an innovation engine for retail IT systems and beyond. At Zapoj, the CEM means providing comprehensive IT incident management solutions that improve efficiency and build an excellent retail experience. Let’s find where CEM fits in your retail territory?

Moving along with the shifting customer expectations is paramount to building a more reliable and loyal retail business. Consumers today are more skeptical about dealing with businesses lacking the proper infrastructure to carefully deliver unprecedented customer value.

The need for providing more convenience, personalization, omnichannel buying opportunities, quick customer support through chat-based software, payment flexibilities including that of frictionless mobile payments – constitute how modern retail should envision its digital capabilities. The ability to provide a pleasant shopping experience both offline and online writes off retail growth and sustainability. During the uncertain times of pandemics, digital disruptions have been a game-changer for retailers, helping them withstand the survival challenge.

To build a greater level of consumer experience and meet their demand, organizations especially retail spurred huge consumerization of IT systems.

As modern retail is pioneering the digital transformation, the sudden COVID-19 survival quest also brought complex IT infrastructure at the core for small-scale businesses too.

IT incidents in any of the systems could result in immediate retail service disruptions, exposing customer experience to extreme risk that impacts the bottom line.

Digital Disruptions or IT Incidents at Retail

Huge assimilation of digital tools enables both customer and employee experience across retail businesses, however, digital failures factor in service discontinuity, and every unexpected downtime exposes retail businesses to huge risk.

Cyber-attacks at peak

Retail owners see unplanned outages as a long-term impact on the security systems, leaving them vulnerable to data breaches. Uninterrupted network connectivity is at the core to support POS functionality or frictionless transactions via card or mobile payments. This is one part of cyber attacks on retail IT properties. There are risks from innovative threat actors in various forms-

Ransomware or malware is an attempt to deny the victim access to IT networks or systems. All systems crash or freeze.
Distributed Denial of Service or (DDOS)causes IT servers and networks to disrupt, denying customers the expected service.
Phishing or social engineering tricks victims or customers into providing personal data – account number, phone number, or address to cheat on money.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) non-compliance puts customer payment information at risk and could lead to hundreds of breaches.

As per the Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), the security-related risk is the major factor to result in web application attacks, and hence disruption of customer service.

IT infrastructure Failure

A business’s IT infrastructure is like plumbing – you only notice it when it stops working. In many organizations, the effect IT has on their smooth operational running is greatly underappreciated, until the system fails and everything grinds to a halt.

Unless you’ve experienced the impact of a business IT failure first hands, such as a server crash, power cut, or data storage malfunction, it can be difficult to grasp just how monumental the consequences can be. Here we look at the wide-ranging damage an IT breakdown can cause, from huge expense to the loss of data, as well as how all of this can be avoided.

If your company’s internal IT infrastructure goes down, you’ll likely feel the pressure of the clock ticking until it’s back up and running. Every minute of downtime is a waste of valuable time in the working day no doubt intended for other tasks, and if the interruption means your team has to down tools too, the financial cost to the business is magnified.

Critical application outage

In recent years, it feels as if many major brands have suffered major application failures during one of the busiest holiday shopping days — Black Friday. Because many of them have.

Seeing big names associated with website crashes and business disruptions may be intimidating to many admins. If large international retailers struggle to keep their applications running smoothly
on the busiest shopping day of the year — when they know far in advance that they’ll need all hands on deck — how can smaller companies prevent downtime on a normal day?

For most modern retailers, which have both brick-and-mortar as well as online sales outlets, ensuring the following is essential:

IT Downtime Costs Retails Big

Gartner says IT downtime costs $ 5,600 per minute on average. The lost revenues can amount to up to $ 100,000 per hour.

The silent interruption that impacts your retail service is the lost productivity of employees. Unexpected IT outages in between noticing, fixing, and getting back to work take up to 6.2 hours per day. It means employees get paid for lost hours they provide no output.

As with data breaches, retail suffers $ 3.9 million in lost revenue on an average per year as per reports by Ponemon Institute.

The inability to provide a seamless and integrated experience across various channels is the factor your retail suffers customer churn. A sudden IT outage leads to denial of payment services, a transaction failure, and long queues in front of billing counters. Delayed customer response also triggers customer frustration, pushing them towards elsewhere.

Retail today cannot deny the frequency of IT incidents and disasters. Adopting a critical event management platform is the most significant IT risk preparedness enabler. Zapoj CEM in such a case is designed to scale and provide all means to tackle IT incidents rapidly.

Here’s Zapoj CEM to keep retail digital disruptions away.

The occurrence of IT incidents and disasters must get through immediate resolution activity because untimely incident handling means unsatisfied customers, damaged reputation, and lost revenues which we already know.

In such critical IT events, collaboration and communication between the IT incident response team are effective in handling IT disruptions or downtime, while limiting their impact on the services.

An automated IT alerting and incident response is a significant capability of Zapoj Critical Event Management or CEM software that validates the intensity of IT incidents and therefore improves the incident recovery process. Zapoj empowers IT incident response teams to fix and restore the service at retail operations in the following manner-

IT Event Intelligence and End to End Visibility

It is important for any digital business to maintain a holistic view into the health of its infrastructure. You can gain full-stack visibility by implementing different monitoring tools to keep track of your IT infrastructure’s health. But just collecting these data or signals isn’t enough; there needs to be a way to normalize, de-dupe, correlate, and gain actionable insights from all this data, and all the events generated by these monitoring tools must be centralized in a single hub, from which they can be triaged and routed to the right on-call responder or team. Zapoj IT Event management leverages machine learning to reduce noise, automate root cause analysis, correlate similar or past incidents with current ones, and create a contextual aggregate of information to help speed up the response.

Seamless integration with IT service management tools

With Zapoj integrations leverage your IT management tools including Service Desk and ITSM solutions on the same platform. This smart integration builds a comprehensive common operating picture that improves visibility into the impacts on your IT assets by any type of critical event. At the same time, the real-time visibility improves your comprehension of a wide range of critical IT service disruptions and helps you streamline your end-to-end IT incident response activities.

Integrated communication and collaboration process

Upon detection of critical incidents, IT incident responders need to notify internal and external stakeholders. Whether severe or minor, an analysis of evolving situations and their severity needs quick attention, and organizations prefer scheduling communication and collaboration between departments and staff on duty. Zapoj enables leaders to create a faster war room or ChatOps for a Response team and stakeholders, providing context to the discussion and helping with accurate decision making.

Data-driven decision making and process improvement

Using Data-driven analytics, understand KPIs like MTTI (Mean time to identify the incident), MTTA (Mean Time to acknowledge), and MTTR( Mean time to resolve). Post mortem report drilled down areas of improvement.

Advancing and scaling the retail experience

Today, retail is at the center stage of delivering the best means to meet consumer needs. Building fast and scalable IT incident-altering technologies contributes to the much-needed aspect of customer experience and customer satisfaction.

As more and more retail managers express their interest in CEM deployment to help with continuous retail operations, Zapoj provides the right technology advancement and AI innovation to nurture that retail desire.

With Zapoj operating 24 hours within your current ITSM tools, you are prepared to handle any IT incident. You prevent them fast, so, there will be no risk of revenue lost due to transaction failure, data breach, or any other types of IT incidents. Customers are better valued as they feel it and know it, it increases their satisfaction level and establishes great brand advocacy that is hard to subdue even if a sudden and unexpected downtime occurs.

Using Zapoj unified critical event management platform, identification of the incident, collaboration, and remediation can be accelerated toward minimizing IT downtime. Understanding CEM is critical to your retail operations, Zapoj fits your immediate needs. Get in touch with us or request a demo today.

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