)
A smartphone for every store employee
24
July
2020
Over the past year, Colruyt Group has invested in personal smartphones for all its store employees. Colruyt Lowest Prices is a frontrunner in this project, with a roll out of 12,000 devices. Having a smartphone means that our employees are better connected on the shop floor and can offer our customers a better service. Even stock checking is now much easier and efficient.
Connected on the shop floor
Before introducing smartphones, we were using devices for each particular task. These devices are suitable for specific tasks, such as collecting the Collect & Go orders. However, because these cannot be used for communication, we invested in a Samsung Xcover 4s for each store employee. Christophe Dehandschutter, Sales Director at Colruyt and coordinator of this project: “With this device, we wish to increase the concept of working together by closing the employee-to-employee gap and eventually closing the gap with colleagues in central services - such as stock management and forecasting. This also means that working together will become easier and more efficient.” Restocking shelves or ordering products will then be done in just a few clicks.
Phased roll-out
At first, for example, the smartphone will be a useful tool for checking product information for a customer. We will then add a chat function for store-related tasks. In subsequent phases, we will look into installing our own Colruyt Group apps (Collect&Go, MyColruyt, Xtra, SmartWithFood, etc.). This will make it a lot easier for store employees to show our customers the numerous possibilities of these apps.
Investing in the digital future
This innovation fits perfectly with our vision of the future and is in line with Colruyt Group's earlier digital steps, such as switching to electronic price labels or our pilot project for the automatic recognition of fruit and vegetables. Like all our other projects, we have extensively tested the roll-out of smartphones. This was initially done at a local level at Colruyt in Ninove and then a further 700 devices in the Leie Region. Even though the Coronavirus crisis caused some delay, all Colruyt Lowest Prices employees in Belgium are now connected via smartphones. These 12,000 devices represent an investment of 17 million euros.
Other store formats
The roll-out of 12,000 smartphones at Colruyt Lowest Prices is pioneering work and paves the way for other store formats to switch to this system as well. It is therefore our ambition that Colruyt Group's other store formats will follow in the coming years, bringing the total number of smartphones to 16,000. We will continue to innovate with the aim of providing efficiency and service to our customers.