Last updated 5 August 2022 ·
Retail is a highly competitive and fast-paced industry, showing no signs of slowing down. This leaves businesses in dire need of finding effective ways to stay ahead of the competition.
Customers want quality products, first-rate customer service, and an integrated shopping experience that comes with all the benefits of traditional shopping and the convenience of modern technology.
Despite technology taking over the retail industry, a lot of the business happens here, as it has happened for years: in physical stores. While this is good news, it takes a lot of skill and accuracy to identify the best location to set up shop, find a market, and identify your customer’s needs and expectations and satisfy them. This is where OKRs can help provide that competitive advantage. If you’re not familiar with them, don’t worry. We offer a comprehensive guide detailing everything you need to know about OKRs. This article relates that to retail businesses and provides some OKR examples to help you get started.
What are OKRs?
OKRs, Objectives and Key Results are an actionable goal-setting and team-oriented framework that significantly benefits most businesses. It helps to boost productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace and increases collaboration and alignment by setting challenging, ambitious yet attainable goals with measurable and time-bound outcomes.
Like most of your New Year’s resolutions that fade before you cross into the second quarter of the year, business goals can be thrown around until they lose meaning, and then what’s the point of setting them? Businesses that implement OKRs find they bridge the gap between goal-setting and goal execution.
How do OKRs help retail businesses?
The most prominent retailers in the industry embed OKRs into their corporate culture to enable managers to focus less on task assignments and more on developing the strategy and encouraging faster results. Here are some ways in which OKRs have elevated retail businesses.
1. Maintaining focus and discipline
This is perhaps the most apparent advantage that retail businesses gain from OKRs. When they set customer-specific experience goals, it gives the employees a sense of direction and reduces distractions. The more they understand what they’re working towards, the more they can manage their workload and make the most of their time.
2. Reduced planning time
Unlike most goal-setting strategies, OKRs force retailers to set their strategic goals and continually work towards achieving them, ensuring they aren’t fixed and then forgotten. OKRs demand a clear planning structure that enables employees to check in more regularly, log their progress and review the process more efficiently. This simple rhythm simplifies and expedites the goal-setting process, freeing up time and resources for strategic execution.
3. Increased employee engagement
Effective OKRs rely on overall participation and are designed to focus on larger goals requiring teams’ contributions rather than individual employees. This approach brings all employees from their respective departments and connects them to the company’s vision and mission, resulting in increased engagement and collaboration.
4. Improved innovation
The practice of regular goal-setting allows a workplace to come together and explore new ideas as they align towards the outcome and reevaluate their priorities. Moreover, it will enable teams to change direction when things are not as expected instead of finishing the process only to discover that there were mis-steps in the middle.
5. Clear communication
OKRs, objectives and key results are all created from the company-wide mission and vision. Employees at all levels and in remote locations can see how their work and peers contribute to the bigger picture of business performance.
OKR examples for retail businesses
Here are some OKR examples that may be found within an average retail business to give you an idea of how OKRs could work within your retail business and hopefully inspire you to get started.
Objective 1: Improve Online Sales
Key Results:
- Increase comparative departmental sales by 2% per month for six months.
- Raise the average transaction from £120 to £150 in three months.
- Increase sales of electricals by 10% by the end of Q2.
- Reduce cart abandonment rates from 30% to 10% within three months.
- Increase average basket size from 10 to 30 items in six months.
Objective 2: Optimise the Inventory Effectively
Key Results:
- Reduce backfill time from 18 hours to 10 hours.
- Improve inventory turns from 11.2 to 6.0.
- Decrease inventory shrinkage from 6% to 3%.
- Decrease average mishandling damages from 5 to 2 per day.
- Improve shelving and organisation settings from 3.5 to 4.5 stars in one month.
Objective 3: Offer Highly Personalised Customer Service
Key Results:
- Launch customer loyalty scheme after six months.
- Increase customer personalisation in automated emails by 20%.
- Conduct customer research, gathering 20 responses each week.
- Increase referral signups per month by 10% by the end of Q3.
- Reduce delivery time by 5% by the end of Q3.
Implementing OKRs
Excellent productivity and goal-setting processes are highly valued assets for any retail business. At Reclaro, we help retail businesses excel by offering unique OKR software and expertise that will guide them towards higher alignment, tighter strategic focus and increased competitive advantage. All in all, to gain market share in such a competitive environment and achieve better results.
For more OKR examples, check out another one of our blogs, OKR examples to help you get started.
If you want to start creating your own OKRs, download our free OKR builder™ today! It provides a step-by-step guide on how to write compelling OKRs in your business.
