Convo’s Retail Social Collaboration Platform takes the form of a social feed, enabling desk and non-desk workers to easily and securely converse and collaborate in real-time without the need for a corporate email.
By simplifying group-based communication across departments, stores and regions, Convo unifies the workforce, empowering employees to become the retailer’s best customer-facing advocates.
Studies show nearly 35% of retail employees feel disengaged with their work, with non-desk workers posing the biggest challenge. Customer-facing, non-desk workers often feel disconnected from the larger organization, which ultimately reflects on customer service – impacting customer satisfaction, sales and brand image.
“The problem is, retailers are still trying to communicate with associates via old-school methods like email and bulletin boards, when that type of one-way communication is ineffective,” said Osman Rashid, CEO of Convo. “Convo brings familiar social media-type functionality to a secure work network – enabling immediate, two-way dialogue and information exchange between all workers — bottom up and top down. By arming frontline workers with tools they know how to use and will readily adopt, retailers can boost employee engagement, morale and performance for a unified workforce.”
Simple, Secure Social Feed
Convo’s Retail Collaboration Platform fosters robust communication and purposeful conversations between team members, store managers and executives. It does so by distilling what is most effective in enterprise social networking, project management software, and productivity apps into a single, indispensable knowledge and store management platform that is accessible across all platforms – Web, desktop and mobile.
At the core of Convo’s Retail Collaboration Platform is its simplicity. The platform takes the form of a social feed, enabling employees to communicate through groups, labels and hashtags, with no employee email address required. They can use familiar tools like video, images and posts to quickly and effectively reach out to co-workers in the same store or other locations or departments. An associate or team manager could use Convo to share team photos and store videos to inspire, motivate and teach, while Marketing could use Convo to share information and ideas about the latest brand campaign or customer service initiative.
All conversations and work done on Convo’s Retail Collaboration Platform are backed by enterprise-grade security. The platform sits in Amazon Web Services (AWS) behind the firewall, so store data is always safe. Furthermore, because everything is stored in the cloud, when an employee leaves the company, a retailer simply turns off their ID, and all data access is removed. Nothing is stored on an employee’s phone.
Collaboration Tools that Boost Efficiency and Employee Experience
Convo helps teams connect and share data wherever they are. It enables departments to get real-time feedback on projects to speed buy-in and implementation, while also acting as a central repository for sharing information across locations, from sales and inventory reports to merchandising plans or construction schedules.
Convo provides a workspace for all employees to do their job faster and communicate and collaborate better. HR can solicit real-time feedback on a resume from relevant teams; associates can obtain access to critical updates for depleted stock on popular items; and managers or district supervisors can leverage Convo to photograph in-store conditions, then post and annotate them for immediate action in order to maintain quality control.
Research shows empowered, engaged employees are more loyal, and deliver better customer service, which in turn drives customers satisfaction and sales. According to Quantum Workplace, organizations with engaged employees have, on average, 24% lower turnover, a 20% increase in sales and 10% higher customer metrics.
Multinational, fast-fashion retail leader H&M has selected and successfully deployed Convo’s Retail Social Collaboration Platform across its U.S. organization of more than 15,000 employees. H&M will use the platform to connect and inform employees across its more than 500 stores throughout the country.
“With a geographically dispersed workforce that is 80% mobile, it’s crucial for us to connect in one place. Convo provides a simple way to do that: its UI and real-time feed are very familiar and similar to other commonly used social platforms. When we rolled this out to our employees, they knew how to use it immediately.”
– Luca Michelangeli, Marketing Manager for H&M USA of H&M
H&M chose Convo because it gave them robust functionality of task management and chat apps in one place, while negating the need for non-desk employees – a large majority of H&M’s workforce – to have a corporate email. The all-in-one solution simplified employee onboarding and use, since there is one platform, and no need to switch between apps. H&M also liked that Convo went beyond conversations to enable in-depth discussions, with context-aware threads and visual feedback, and that it’s easily accessible to all employees, regardless of device.
About Convo
Convo unifies the workforce. It uniquely combines the ease of social networks with rich collaboration capabilities to simplify and optimize work interactions for all employees – no email required. By enabling easy, secure conversations between desk and non-desk workers, Convo accelerates company productivity and engagement. Based in Los Altos, CA, Convo is a privately-held company.
