Retailers Accelerate Innovation and Pack 10 Years Into 10 Months

We all know what an incredible impact the pandemic has had on our lives. And one of those impacts is how we shop. Retailers have had to make massive changes in how they sell, communicate, and interact with us. 

Steve Lamar is the president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association. AAFA members include Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Ralph Lauren, Macy’s, and 500 more companies. In a CNBC interview, Steve explained how retailers have “implemented 10 years of innovation in the last 10 months…from every angle: retail, supply chain, sourcing, technology.” 

Steve also described how the seamless integration of brick and mortar stores and online shopping into an omnichannel experience has been a vision that retailers expected would take 10 years. But the pandemic accelerated that vision because retailers had to find a safe way to stay open for business: “You buy online, you pick up in the store. There’s curbside pickup, and now you can return products [to the store] that you buy online… That seamless integration is really becoming the rule, it used to be the exception, but we’re going to see a lot more of that,” Steve said.

We’ve also worked with major retailers to assist with their response to COVID-19. Using Legion WFM, customers have managed new compliance regulations and safety protocols, healthy worker scheduling, contact tracing, and employee health surveys and communications.

Traci Rubin is the Director of Human Resources at SMCP, a leader in the global ready-to-wear and accessories market. Traci spoke during our webcast about how Legion WFM has helped her team reach their goals of increasing productivity and reducing administrative work for their managers, raising profitability by optimizing their labor to give managers more time to sell, and ensuring compliance with labor laws and regulations. Those goals were tested when the pandemic hit. “It would have been extremely difficult for us to manage COVID-19 without Legion WFM,” she said.

The AI-powered Legion WFM platform provides an automated way for retailers to support their employees’ health and well-being. Plus, they can schedule healthy employees to deliver services, so they meet their revenue goals. With Legion WFM, employers can easily send health surveys in the employee scheduling app and mobile time clock, integrate test results in their HR system for healthy worker status, and assign badges for potentially infected employees to ensure they aren’t scheduled.

Contact tracing with in-app notifications also helps employers Identify and notify workers who shared shifts with potentially infected employees. Managers can identify all workers who overlapped with potentially infected workers, instantly send in-app notifications to co-workers, get a list or diagram view of the tracing path with data from the schedule and clock, export the list for email notifications, and instantly clear schedules by converting to open shifts if a worker is potentially infected.

Our customers used these features to ensure their stores stayed open with a healthy staff, so they could continue offering products and services to their customers in the safest way. As Steve Lamar said, we’ve seen unprecedented levels of innovation in many areas globally. Many of these changes will remain in place after the pandemic, and they’ve helped keep consumers safe while getting the goods and services they need.