Why you should switch over and upgrade your merchandising solution today
Upgrading to a modern merchandising solution should be one of your top priorities as you plan out your year. Act now to ensure you start reaping the full benefits today.
Merchandising is an important activity for retailers, but persistent staff shortages mean employees’ time is better spent actually serving customers. Using agency and broker merchandising reps is an established practice among retailers and CPGs. However, the traditional model has its drawbacks.
These reps are usually full-time employees working fixed hours, and that makes it difficult for agencies and brokers to provide the agility needed to cope with changing circumstances. Not only does this affect the normal ebb and flow of business, but it makes irregular peaks such as major planogram changes challenging as well. Rather, the model is based on sending merchandisers to stores on a regular schedule, regardless of the work that needs to be done.
This type of employment also makes it difficult for these agencies to provide service in areas where they don’t have enough clients to support a full-time worker. In contrast, Trax Dynamic Merchandising uses contractor merchandisers and supports their work with advanced technology.
The Trax Flexforce on-demand, flexible workforce is comprised of contractors who are paid for doing the tasks they’re assigned, not for the time they work. This means workers can be deployed when and where they are needed, even in rural parts of the country.
Furthermore, Trax uses its market-leading technology to ensure that the right rep is sent to the right store at the right time, to assign the most important tasks to be addressed on each visit, and to provide 100% quality control for every task.
On arrival at a store, the merchandiser uses the Trax image recognition app which records the state of the shelves, compares it with the desired state, and then applies customized rules to generate a list of tasks to be performed.
Unlike other approaches that simply assign tasks according to a predetermined schedule, Trax Dynamic Merchandising lives up to its name by assigning the tasks with the best ROI at the moment that the merchandiser starts working — in some cases, tasks that nobody knew needed doing until the merchandiser arrived.
The use of Trax’s computer vision technology also extends to quality control. Before and after photos of shelves are turned into data, which is then compared to ensure that the assigned tasks were correctly executed. This process is carried out for every task on every visit, providing clients with assurance that the work they pay for has actually been done. And merchandisers who do a good job are rewarded with opportunities to do more work, driving a virtuous circle.
We already mentioned the agility of Trax Dynamic Merchandising in the context of adapting to changing requirements, but it’s worth noting that the service can respond to new requests in a matter of hours rather than the weeks that are typically needed by traditional agencies and brokers. This agility also applies to quickly onboarding new clients: in urgent situations, Trax Dynamic Merchandising and Flexforce can be at work in your stores just days after the contract has been signed.
So don’t delay — act now and see the difference that 21st century merchandising makes for your brand in 2022 and beyond.
Discover even more about the power of Trax Dynamic Merchandising and Flexforce. Download the Trax whitepaper, Contract workers improve the efficiency, flexibility, and quality of merchandising.
