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Prevent Store Disruptions with Zapoj Critical Event Management

Anticipating external risks always gives you an edge- you can prevent any major consequences like avoiding indefinite business closure, revisiting recovery policies, or operating without as much workforce as you may need. Right from the cruel impacts of the ongoing pandemic to very distinctive emergencies, your retail store operations can fall prey to risks at any point in time.

Here in this blog, we discuss how Zapoj, an AI-powered CEM tool helps retail owners mitigate the impacts of some major critical events, avoid store disruptions, and promote resiliency.

Critical events that disrupt store operations

Critical events are fickle and unpredictable, and they are different by nature. In general, critical events have one thing in common- to disrupt operations irrespective of how they evolve. The most usual level of threats to your business comes from

  • Man-made disasters – civil unrest, active shooter, terrorist attacks, riots, or strikes
  • Natural disasters – bad weather, cyclone, flood, storms, earthquake, pandemic, and wildfire. 

Each of the threats has a different level of impact on your business, which is detrimental to your success. Let’s see how they impact your retail store operations.

How do critical events impact your store operations?

Right from man-made disasters to natural disasters, the threat scopes have increased for stores and their business resiliency. 

Retail alone garners $3.8 trillion worth of annual revenues, which is the easiest target of terror attacks and perhaps more impactful at disrupting services and sales. Significantly, the number of attacks has risen from 14,371 to 18302 between 2006 and 2021. Retailers being unequipped to handle the situation, it is more of a challenge to keep everyone informed and safe. 

Active shootout incidents are quite relevant during this ongoing pandemic, however, this is not also a new trend. Mass shootings span beyond campus or streets, they are now more active in areas like grocery stores and other retail stores.

Natural disasters are quite impactful and effective in disrupting services at retail stores. More than this common phenomena, earthquakes, flooding, severe weather, tropical cyclones, winter weather, or wildfire can drive direct economic losses. Since 2019, we have witnessed as many as 12 individual natural disaster events with four severe weather outbreaks, four tropical cyclones, two flooding events, and wildfires on average every year across the world. Among them, the costliest economic peril was severe weather events. 

As they add up, an unprecedented growth challenge may fall out. Here’s what potential impact you can expect from these threats:  

Lost Revenues: 

In the retail sphere alone, severe weather costs your business $630 billion in lost revenues.  In situations like natural disasters, retail stores operating in any industry are likely to face disruptions too.

Man-made catastrophes including pandemics are directly related to panic-stricken buying behavior, even though store operational managers also have little to no resources that can support reopening at the earliest. Going forward, small businesses are more vulnerable to these critical situations. This means financial losses are always high incurred by shortfalls in sales, drop in cash flow, and business closures.

Waste of inventory 

Extreme weather conditions, anything from tornadoes and hurricanes to heat and snow can easily qualify to cause damage to your inventory. Since you don’t anticipate or have any preparedness to handle these situations, more than often critical events can affect your inventories, and not to mention your bottom line.  It results in being understocked in the coming months, which later adds to difficulties in order fulfillment or shipment. 

Employee safety at stake

Pandemic, natural disasters, or man-made disasters can have potential threats to employee safety. Your employees are scattered between different departments, they are traveling, or working off-site. A different kind of isolated situation can become threatening to their lives or security. It’s an organizational duty to improve the safety and security of your employees. An inability to implement or ensure an enhanced safety or security can lead to employees being out of action, which directly affects productivity and business continuity. 

Lost LTV from customer churn 

As situations aggravate with changing norms of critical events, you are less likely to restore operations timely. A lot of time goes into the decision-making with stakeholders and partners to decide the next course of the action plan. Being understocked or having not enough stocks, you end up frustrating your customers. Simultaneously, your store is unable to operate with a full workforce, which makes it difficult to manage the influx of shoppers, meaning it sends out a negative impression and adds to customer fatigue. These are enough reasons to reduce the lifetime value of customers and therefore cause customer churn.  

Brand damage 

The less you are prepared to handle the evolving critical situations with time, the more you are at risk of losing your brand reputation. Every second matters as you lose momentum due to inadequate inventories, staffing issues, and resources. Delays in business continuity impact user experience, their trust, and confidence in you. Altogether, your brand falls apart, and your customers tend to lean towards those businesses that meet their demands. 

How can you prevent store disruptions?

Here’s Zapoj that helps prevent store disruptions by allowing granular level threat intelligence. Identify if your people or assets are in harm’s way and provide accurate context to reduce their impacts.  

Keeping employees safe and secure 

Be it pandemic, disease, or other threat-related updates, Zapoj facilitates reaching out to the right employee at the right time. 

During incidents like active shootouts or natural disasters, geofencing or location awareness gives you contextual information and helps you detect who’s in harm’s way.  This capability is also powerful for contact tracing for COVID-19 infections that ensures the safety and security of your employees.

Keeping up with customer demand 

To be able to prevent store disruptions and continuously meet the customer demand in the most critical times is the nice thing about increasing brand loyalty and earning customer trust. Zapoj CEM dedicatedly takes care of this important affair.

  • On-call schedules – Resilience is key to maintaining your retail or eCommerce success. An unpredictable emergency- active shootout or natural disaster that impacts employee capacity can cause immediate shortfall and affect normal operations. To make up for capacity shortages, automated on-call schedules can fill emergency shifts and help keep up with operations. Zapoj automatically sends out notifications to available team members to resolve issues as they arise. 

 

Zapoj is a geographically dispersed system so it can reach employees at any time and anywhere on devices that they use. Hence, sustaining capacity and restoring operations become much easier.

  • Situational awareness- By pulling in data from different sources, you can integrate them into a Zapoj visual Risk intelligence to gain a common operating picture. This gives you situational awareness of the day-to-day challenges and makes it easier to identify potential threats which are likely to disrupt your operations. Using this capability, disaster preparedness is faster and more effective and you can keep your people, assets or inventory protected. So, you are prepared to handle risks and manage operations to meet customer expectations. 

 

With Zapoj providing real-time risk intelligence, store operation managers can easily sustain operations from threats and save their employees. Let’s discover how Zapoj works to help with effective risk management that advocates for business resiliency.

Zapoj makes threat response fast and effective

Organizations everywhere need to protect their people, assets, and infrastructure as critical events are erupting on a global scale. Combating these situations with just traditional systems is not enough as they are not engineered to work through the complexity of data. Zapoj is designed in such a way to handle complicated data so you can work through data, identify and evaluate risks, and prevent its impact.

  • Discover:Your risk analysts work round the clock to keep track of potential threats. Zapoj gathers hyper-localized data in an automated way from social media, local media, government, or private bodies into its system. This is a scalable way for your analysts to identify the type and level of risk, and derive accurate insights into it, thereby, making it effortless to achieve context to the information while enabling accurate reporting without any ambiguity. 
  • Action: Getting accurate information is vital to cut through the noise, which also helps reduce time to respond and act. You can filter through only the priority-based information and pass it to responders- employees, stakeholders, peers, or partners- to take necessary action. 
  •  Examine: Zapoj uses an auto-escalation process to automate these reports. No matter where your response team or stakeholders are, Zapoj CEM can instantly help build a single-click conference bridge to synchronize your team and accelerate collaboration and response. Multi-modal communication capabilities supported by clear and concise pre-built message templates help save time in reaching the right person via voice calls and texts on any device. Therefore, the level of accuracy and precision that Zapoj provides keeps you ahead of incidents and helps mitigate them before they become tough to handle. 
  • Analyze: Critical events are inevitable and they keep coming. Mitigating risks just before, during, or after isn’t everything. We all want to keep our business resilient and not to mention – save resources in risk mitigation efforts. The post-incident analysis is a key to build a robust recovery plan by evaluating areas for improvement and more scopes into what steps you should take on the basis of different types of critical events- as you ensure accountability of your risk mitigation efforts, you will be better prepared to prevent risks and business losses. 

CEM in today’s evolving critical environment is not a nice-to-have tool, but a must-have business resilient platform.  Zapoj is nicely designed to expedite profits or cut losses while also advocating for your brand value.  Want a demo? Get in touch with us today.

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ZSuite

How Can You Keep Retail Employees Safe with Zapoj CEM?

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.