Keeping Your Merchandisers Engaged – Best Practices

When your team works outside the office, driving engagement is usually harder, taking more effort and investment. Keeping your merchandisers inspired and motivated is more difficult when they are constantly on the go. Nevertheless, an engaged merchandiser, who is aware of company’s marketing goals and ready to work hard to realize them, is a real competitive advantage for a company.

Developing engagement requires a two-way relationship between merchandisers and their managers. Today, with the development of mobile technologies and mobile merchandising software solutions, keeping your merchandisers engaged is easier than ever. To keep your merchandisers engaged and motivated, simply implement the right type of merchandising software with proper communication features, so your managers can easily build positive two-way relationships with merchandisers, who are out of the office.

Merchandising software allows implementing effective engagement techniques to make your merchandisers feel a part of the team. To help you keep your merchandisers engaged, VisitBasis prepared the recommendations listed below. With these four techniques driving engagement does not have to be expensive or time consuming. Hope it works!

1. Provide the two-way communication between merchandisers and back office. The up-to-date merchandising applications provide built-in messenger and automatic notifications on the activities performed. When managers are always aware of the needs of merchandisers they can react more quickly to point of sale situations, requiring their attention, improving customer service and efficiency. Feeling connected, merchandisers are more engaged and motivated.
2. Make merchandisers’ job less manual and more rewarding. Merchandising software is essential when it comes to providing your merchandisers with mobile access to information and the up-to-date data collection tools. Empowering your merchandisers with a merchandising application for tablets and smartphones allows capturing data faster while minimizing mistakes.
3. Mark merchandisers’ progress. Merchandising software allows managers to link their engagement efforts to performance by easily evaluating how merchandisers are performing in the field. Real-time dashboards and reports provide real-time access to KPIs for the managers, so they can get valuable insights to tell merchandisers how they’re doing and where they’re fit in.
4. Cheer merchandisers to get more of good performance. With merchandising software solutions managers and supervisors are able to monitor merchandisers on the map getting time-stamped and GPS-confirmed data on routes and tasks performed. Built-in messaging capabilities allow managers to quickly send a message to thank a merchandiser for the task performed, instantly reinforcing the right behaviors, or make timely remarks to give him an opportunity to improve performance.

To get more information merchandising automation, or to get you free access to VisitBasis merchandising software, visit www.visitbasis.com.