Nearly every business has a slow season – or, at least, slow days. Keeping your team productive at those times can be a real difference maker for your business. Here are some productivity tips that will help you drive success and make intelligent updates to your business during those periods when you and your team have a bit of extra time on your hands.
Give Your Retail Space a Facelift
What’s the first thing you judge when you walk into a retail business? Likely, its appearance. If your retail business is in need of a makeover, slow days are the perfect time to get started. Round up your team and take their suggestions, as well as gather customer feedback. Then, when you have a slow day, make some upgrades to your store space, even if it's as simple as putting up new art, adding some new furniture, or just changing out minor décor such as plants. You’re likely to find it will make a big difference in the perception of your customers and employees alike.
Train and Train Some More
Slow days are the perfect time to provide your employees with some additional training. Train them up on everything from greeting customers to closing sales and maintaining relationships with long-term customers over time. Develop a series of training programs, and go through them sequentially even with your seasoned employees – there’s always something for someone to learn. Make your training programs fun and solicit employee feedback at the end of each one to improve them for your next slow day.
Dive Into Employee Feedback
Retail business owners who ask for in-depth feedback from their employees and have frank conversations with them often discover surprising results. Sometimes, what team members tell business owners is hard to hear, but it can help you make critical changes to improve your business.
Conduct a survey of your team members and collect their feedback directly, in open conversations. You very well may find out that it’s time to give your retail business plan a bit of a makeover and you could get closer with your team in the process.
Explore Consumer Finance Together
Last but not least is the option of a retail business owner or manager and their team members learning all about consumer finance and its many benefits for retail businesses. Maybe you already have a retail finance program. Maybe you’ve never run one and you are looking to get started. In any case, there are probably lessons to be learned about how consumer finance can give your business a big boost – and that’s something you can, and should, talk about with your retail team.
Explore how a robust consumer finance program can give your business a revenue boost, and break down the simple concept of how offering finance to every customer during every sale will boost your revenue over time (it really is simply a numbers game).
Finally, take some time to learn all about FormPiper, a complete consumer finance automation solution, and share what you learn with your employees. You may just find that FormPiper is the exact solution your team has been hankering for. And, with a strong consumer finance program boosted by FormPiper, you may just find revenue rising, customer relationships strengthening, and more sales closing over time.
